Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/151

Rh no whit the less valuable for this. Thought going into the mind may change form, as food turns into blood, but it is never lost.

However, though the jotting down of impressions against paragraphs read is never, in itself, useless, it is none the less proper to warn you against writing too many of these memoranda. Very frequent or very long pauses for that purpose not only consume time but also interrupt interest and dim the impression made on you by the author's thought as a whole. Moreover, it is pleasant to reflect that the older you grow in the reading business the less you will need to remit reading for the sake of a note and the less likely you will be to do so unnecessarily. Take notes, then, but not too many.

Notes should be written in ink, legibly, each with careful reference to book, chapter and paragraph or page. You will never know which of your many entries you may by and by wish to appeal to, and it would be a pity in time of need, to have aid near, of which, owing to negligent writing, you could not avail yourself. Use for notes very ordinary blank books, or pads, of good paper, writing on only one side of a leaf, so that each leaf may be readily detached if necessary. Take notes, not many, but few, perfectly plain, and on easily detachable leaves.

We have been explaining that the reader must "take" notes: We now urge that he must "make" notes, by which is meant something additional and more important. The new point is this: that you should not be satisfied with thinking your author's thoughts after him, but should follow out all fertile suggestions made by him, into reflections of your own. Horace Bushnell used to say that he could never possibly read a book through. If it did not "find" him he threw it away on that account. If it did "find" him he was early beguiled by it into independent cogitations, which interested him more than the author's, so that he deserted the book on their account. These reactions of the readers's own mentality are the very best fruit of reading. Encourage them: give up to them: let them divert and master you. The book which drives you from itself by rousing you to amend, refute or amplify its teaching is precisely the book you need. It is life-giving food for your mind.

You here discover what was meant by the remark that we digest mental stores in conserving them and conserve them by digesting.

All thought-germs of your own, no less than the plants not your own that you culled from the other man's garden; the original matters no less than the memoranda, must be laid away, so many green flowers, for preservation in note-books. Use one and the same series of books for both sorts of products.

So far as you can manage it, whether with the notes you have taken or with the notes you have made, confine each note to one subject and to one page of the book, leaving the rest of the page blank. If a note