But we cannot successfully eliminate and teach by itself that which is
purely practical. The easiest and surest why of acquiring facts is to
learn them in groups, in systems, and systematized knowledge is science.
You can very often carry two facts fastened together more easily than one
by itself, as a housemaid can carry two pails of water with a hoop more
easily than one without it. You can remember a man's face, made up of
many features, better than you can his nose or his mouth or his eye-brow.
Scores of proverbs show you that you can remember two lines that rhyme
better than one without the jingle. The ancients, who knew the laws of
memory, grouped the seven cities that contended for the honor of being
Homer's birthplace in a line thus given by Aulus Gellius:
Smurna, Rodos, Colophon, Salamin, Ios, Argos, Athenai.
I remember, in the earlier political days of Martin Van Buren, that
Colonel Stone, of the "New York Commercial," or one of his
correspondents, said that six towns of New York would claim in the same
way to have been the birth-place of the "Little Magician," as he was then
called; and thus he gave their names, any one of which I should long ago
have forgotten, but which as a group have stuck tight in my memory from
that day to this;
Catskill, Saugerties, Redhook, Kinderhook, Scaghticoke, Schodac.
If the memory gains so much by mere rhythmical association, how much more
will it gain when isolated facts are brought together under laws and
principles, when organs are examined in their natural connections, when
structure is coupled with function, and healthy and diseased action are
studied as they pass one into the other! Systematic, or scientific study
is invaluable as supplying a natural kind of mnemonics, if for nothing
else.
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