770 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



these are talkers of to-day or yesterday. Good talkers no doubt 

 there are even in the younger generation, but in comparison with 

 the number of scholars of the day the number of good talkers is 

 pitifully small. What men know they have acquired for the 

 most part through the eye, and such knowledge is not in form to 

 be brought out readily through the mouth. This is a generation 

 of readers, writers, thinkers, experimenters, inventors, but not of 

 talkers. Under our present conditions of life we may expect con- 

 versational power to decline still more than it has done. 



In conclusion, it may be asked what the effect of our eye-mind- 

 edness is and will be upon the memory. Psychologists no longer 

 speak so much of the memory as the memories. With the greater 

 use of the eye, the eye-memory will gain ; with the lesser use of 

 the ear the ear-memory will lose. Practically, however, our pres- 

 ent mental habits are destructive of our retentive powers generally. 

 To the vast number of visual impressions made upon the mind 

 daily, it is impossible to apply the two principal conditions of 

 good memory attention and repetition. Newspaper reading may 

 be taken as a good illustration of our memory-destroying habits. 

 In a half -hour devoted to " glancing over " a bulky newspaper, 

 many thousand visual impressions may be received. To the sen- 

 sations themselves we pay no attention, and usually but little to the 

 words or to the thoughts represented. The matter we read is not 

 worth careful attention nor any repetition. We retain little or 

 none of it and do not care to. An item that we may wish to retain 

 for future use is perhaps cut out and pasted in a scrap-book, and, 

 lest we fail even to remember where it is, our scrap-book has an 

 index. The eye-educated man is found to be well posted in a sub- 

 ject, provided he has a day's notice in which to " cram " from his 

 note-books and library. Nothing suffers so much by disuse as 

 memory. The memory age is past. The merchant has found a 

 better way of keeping his accounts than in his head. Everywhere 

 a man's necessary knowledge far surpasses his retentive capacity. 

 Some will say that this is merely an incidental change in the 

 direction of our mental activity due to our changed conditions of 

 life, and indeed an economical change. Any real deterioration of 

 memory, however, would be a loss of mental symmetry for which 

 there could be no compensation. 



In our present enthusiastic devotion to the eye it is not alone 

 the symmetry of the mind that is threatened nor the voice arts 

 alone that will suffer. It may be that we are neglecting that 

 which is in itself one of the richest sources of good. It has not 

 yet been shown that the world of form is more worthy of our cul- 

 tivation than the world of sound. "There is something as yet 

 unanalyzed about sound," says Mr. Haweis, " which doubles and 

 intensifies at all points the sense of living : when we hear we are 



