choosing the things that should be committed to memory the utmost care
and forethought must be exercised; as lessons well learnt in youth are
never forgotten. This precious soil must therefore be cultivated so as
to bear as much fruit as possible. If you think how deeply rooted in
your memory are those persons whom you knew in the first twelve years
of your life, how indelible the impression made upon you by the events
of those years, how clear your recollection of most of the things that
happened to you then, most of what was told or taught you, it will
seem a natural thing to take the susceptibility and tenacity of the
mind at that period as the ground-work of education. This may be done
by a strict observance of method, and a systematic regulation of the
impressions which the mind is to receive.

But the years of youth allotted to a man are short, and memory is, in
general, bound within narrow limits; still more so, the memory of any
one individual. Since this is the case, it is all-important to fill
the memory with what is essential and material in any branch of
knowledge, to the exclusion of everything else. The decision as to
what is essential and material should rest with the masterminds in
every department of thought; their choice should be made after the
most mature deliberation, and the outcome of it fixed and determined.
Such a choice would have to proceed by sifting the things which it
is necessary and important for a man to know in general, and then,
necessary and important for him to know in any particular business
or calling. Knowledge of the first kind would have to be classified,
after an encyclopaedic fashion, in graduated courses, adapted to the
degree of general culture which a man may be expected to have in the
circumstances in which he is placed; beginning with a course limited
to the necessary requirements of primary education, and extending
upwards to the subjects treated of in all the branches of