72 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS. 



least of the scenes which the description has aheady pencilled in 

 his mind. 



The fewer well selected books a youth has to begin with the 

 safer he is against loss of time. The most important question at that 

 period of life is not what shall I read, but what need I read. His 

 care should be to read as little and think as much as possible ; thus 

 he will find what he immediately requires to know, and so make the 

 need the object of his next acquirement in his books. This method 

 tends to education, develops mental power, and makes a cultivated 

 man. A man does not want to be a mere animated book-case, but 

 he wants to have within himself the condensed matter of the book- 

 case. A hurried careless method of reading is one of the chief dangers 

 a student should guard against, and the habit of casting a book aside 

 as soon as read, without pondering over its contents, recalling the 

 argument and refreshing the memory where it failed, is apt to render 

 worthless all the previous effort. Whateley said that writing an 

 analysis or table of contents, or notes, is very important for the study 

 of any one subject. A fact or subject sought out fixes itself more 

 firmly in the memory than most of those passed in the ordinary 

 course of reading. The ever increasing mass of periodical literature 

 tends more and more to the habit of a snatchy mode of perusal, but 

 to a certain extent this has its advantage. A busy man who has not 

 time to turn aside from his own work to the thorough investigation ■ 

 of the topic of the hour may sometimes, in the pages of a magazine, 

 find the case tersely stated by distinguished advocates on both sides, 

 and he may thus discern the main positions of assailant and assailed. 

 A good review of a new work is occasionally afforded by periodical 

 literature. But, to have any real value a review should be read only 

 after the work to which it relates. Distinct from the discriminating 

 reader and progressive student, there is a very large class who are mere 

 devotees of books of any kind, reading, however, chiefly the lighter 

 literature of the day. These become feeble minded, intellectually 

 dissipated and incapable of serious study. This class exists chiefly 

 amongst women, girls and boys, and they become so absorbed in 

 light reading that many of them are ignorant even of the existence of 

 works of standard merit. Men are not so much given to this, but 

 that may be accounted for by their more continuous use of the news- 

 paper, which is to their taste what cheap literature is to the others. 



