60 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



babies pass through a succession of hobbies in their various games and 

 sports, and methods of speech and conduct, likes and repulsions, and so 

 forth, which are successively and almost completely forgotten. The 

 whole process of education, public and private, is based throughout on 

 the imperfections and uncertainties of memory. If it were possible for 

 youths to retain what they read, or hear, or see, our schools and col- 

 leges might be closed, or, at least, remain open but one month in a 

 year. With children, as with adults, life is but a series of unremember- 

 able experiences ; to live is to forget. 



All boasted human learning is a temporary treasure, a loan rather 

 than a permanent gift, which must be watched and tended every mo- 

 ment lest it slip from our possession. Truly has it been said that schol- 

 arship consists not in knowledge but in knowing where knowledge can 

 be found : he is the learned man who knows not the contents of books 

 but what the best books in any specialty are. School and academy and 

 university graduates, who after years of active and it may be eminent 

 professional life look over the examination-papers of alma mater and 

 the catechisms of their childhood, find invariably that outside of the 

 special lines of their lives they are unable to answer correctly and with 

 certainty the simplest questions, and must conclude that all the wisdom 

 of the world is with sophomores and school-children. Even special de- 

 partments are, through the limitations of human capacity, so minutely 

 specialized that one soon despairs of remembering anything more than 

 what belongs to the daily routine in the pursuit of a specialty ; an ori- 

 ginal author in science must continually refer to the books he has writ- 

 ten, lest he forget his own discoveries. 



Some experiments that I have made with the memory, the full 

 details of which are to be published elsewhere, give results that are 

 of the highest significance in their bearings on the study of human 

 testimony. These experiments were modeled in part on the familiar 

 " Russian game," so called, which is sometimes practised by the young 

 as an amusement, and which consists in telling some short story to a 

 party, who at once repeats it, or all that he remembers, or thinks he 

 remembers, to another party, and so on through a series of half a dozen 

 or more individuals. In order to make the experiment a fair one, and 

 of value in the study of memory, the story designed as a test should be 

 short and simple, and should be written out and clearly stated to the 

 individual who stands second in the series. The second individual takes 

 a third individual into another room, writes out the story from his 

 recollection and reads it, the third party does the same by the fourth, 

 and so on. When all the stories are compared, at the close of the ex- 

 periment, this general result is invariably reached : 



1. No two of the stories agree. All have departed more or less 

 widely not only from the original, but from the account which they 

 themselves directly received from the person next to them in the series. 



