Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/150

146 reading follow your bent. Deal with poetry or essays, with history or science, with philosophy or art, as may best suit your fancy. Make yourself an authority on some particular author or cluster of authors, or upon the literature of a race or of a century. In a case of this sort the cautions to be observed are: Keep your reading unitary and systematic, and do not try to cover too much ground. If you have no bent, read history and biography.

One means, then, to the utilizing of opportunities for reading is: Hoard, miserly, your minutes; and another is: Choose carefully your matter. We now go on to speak of a third means, and it is: Methodically digest and conserve; methodically conserve and digest. Either form of phrasing the rule is correct, for we conserve our mental attainments by digesting them and we digest them by conserving.

Many people read vastly, yet never have much to show for it, because they trust to interest and memory to retain what ought to stay with them, using no method for assisting memory. It is a great mistake. Memory is invaluable, of course, and should be hard worked. The exercise of piling up in one's memory nuggets of literary gold can not be commended too highly. Still, the reader who employs no mnemonic apparatus, no mechanism, no ways and means for supplementing memory work, is an intellectual prodigal. What means or contrivances can be suggested for conserving and digesting the useful matter with which reading supplies the mind?

We must learn to assort as we read, to attend to what has meaning for us and pass lightly over the rest. "Some books," says Bacon, "are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested." Few books are worth reading word for word. Much can be skipped without loss. Many a good book is of such a character that if you begin by carefully perusing the preface and table of contents, so as to discover the author's train of thought, you can read the rest at the average rate of three or four pages per minute. This reading at a gallop is a knack into which one grows by long practise. You gradually acquire a feeling for what you want and fix the mind on that alone. Thought is thus freer to master "for keeps" the passages deserving this, which is as important as the ignoring of the rest. The question, "Understandest thou, then, what thou readest?" is as pertinent as it is old.

Take notes in reading, partly to fix attention, helping you recall in general what you may never need or care to recall in detail, and partly to make fast for future consultation the matters which most forcibly impress you. No one can tell you, and you can not prescribe to yourself, when, upon what occasion, upon what sort of a passage to take a note. Feeling, prescience, second sight, must guide. Many data that you put down will never seem to profit you, but the note-taking may be