Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 July 1884 — A Way to Grow Wise. [ARTICLE]

A Way to Grow Wise.

After reading a book, or an article, or an item of information from any reliable source, before turning your attention to other things, give two or three minutes’ quiet thought to the subject that has just been presented to your mind; see how much you can remember concerning it; and if there were any new ideas, instructive facts, or points of especial interest that impressed you as you read, force yourself to recall them. It may be a little troublesome at first until your mind gets under control-and learns to obey your will, but the very effort to think it all out will engrave the facts deeply upon the memory, so deeply that they will not be effaced by the rushing in of a new and different set of ideas; whereas, if the matter be given no further consideration at all, the impressions you have received will fade away so entirely that within a few weeks you will be totally unable to remember more than a dim outline of them. Form the good habit, then, of always reviewing what has just been read. It exercises and disciplines the mental faculties, strengthens the memory, and teaches concentration of thought. You will soon learn, in this way, to think and reason intelligently, to separate and classify different kinds of information; and in time the mind, instead of being a lumber-room in xvhich the various contents are thrown together in careless confusion and disorder, will become a store-honse where each special class or item of knowledge, neatly labeled, has its own particular place and is ready for use the instant there is need of it.— Martha Holmes Bates, in St. Nicholas. “Yes,” sighed Amelia', “before marriage George professed to be willing to die for me, and now he won’t even get his.life injured in my favor,” and the poor girl Durst into a fashionable flood of tqars.« ; - ' - “Man wants but little ear below,” was written before the telephone was invented. "