lness, which lays bare an important law of the mind.

His method was to read over his list until he could repeat it once by
heart unhesitatingly. The number of repetitions required for this was a
measure of the difficulty of the learning in each particular case. Now,
after having once learned a piece in this way, if we wait five minutes,
we find it impossible to repeat it again in the same unhesitating
manner. We must read it over again to revive some of the syllables,
which have already dropped out or got transposed. Ebbinghaus now
systematically studied the number of readings-over which were necessary
to revive the unhesitating recollection of the piece after five minutes,
half an hour, an hour, a day, a week, a month, had elapsed. The number
of rereadings required he took to be a measure of the _amount of
forgetting_ that had occurred in the elapsed interval. And he found some
remarkable facts. The process of forgetting, namely, is vastly more
rapid at first than later on. Thus full half of the piece seems to be
forgotten within the first half-hour, two-thirds of it are forgotten at
the end of eight hours, but only four-fifths at the end of a month. He
made no trials beyond one month of interval; but, if we ourselves
prolong ideally the curve of remembrance, whose beginning his
experiments thus obtain, it is natural to suppose that, no matter how
long a time might elapse, the curve would never descend quite so low as
to touch the zero-line. In other words, no matter how long ago we may
have learned a poem, and no matter how complete our inability to
reproduce it now may be, yet the first learning will still show its
lingering effects in the abridgment of the time required for learning it
again. In short, Professor Ebbinghaus's experiments show that things
which we are quite unable definitely to recall have nevertheless
impressed themselves, in some way, upon the structure of the mind. We
are different for having once learned them. The resistances in our
systems of brain-paths are altered. Our apprehensions are quickened. Our
conclusions from certain premises are probably not just what they would
be if those modifications were not there. The latter influence the whole
margin of our consciousness, even though their products, not being
distinctly reproducible, do not directly figure at the focus of the
field.

The teacher should draw a lesson from these facts. We are all too apt to
measure the gains of our pupils by th