st, amounts to the
common argument, "that such information will be useful to them
hereafter, when they hear history mentioned in conversation."

Some people imagine, that the memory resembles a store-house, in which
we should early lay up facts; and they assert, that, however useless
these may appear at the time when they are laid up, they will
afterwards be ready for service at our summons. One allusion may be
fairly answered by another, since it is impossible to oppose allusion
by reasoning. In accumulating facts, as in amassing riches, people
often begin by believing that they value wealth only for the use they
shall make of it; but it often happens, that during the course of
their labours, they learn habitually to set a value upon the coin
itself, and they grow avaricious of that which they are sensible has
little intrinsic value. Young people who have accumulated a vast
number of facts, and names, and dates, perhaps intended originally to
make some good use of their treasure; but they frequently forget their
laudable intentions, and conclude by contenting themselves with the
display of their nominal wealth. Pedants and misers forget the real
use of wealth and knowledge, and they accumulate without rendering
what they acquire useful to themselves or to others.

A number of facts are often stored in the mind, which lie there
useless, because they cannot be found at the moment when they are
wanted. It is not sufficient, therefore, in education, to store up
knowledge; it is essential to arrange facts so that they shall be
ready for use, as materials for the imagination, or the judgment, to
select and combine. The power of retentive memory is exercised too
much, the faculty of recollective memory is exercised too little, by
the common modes of education. Whilst children are reading the history
of kings, and battles, and victories; whilst they are learning tables
of chronology and lessons of geography by rote, their inventive and
their reasoning faculties are absolutely passive; nor are any of the
facts which they learn in this manner, associated with circumstances
in real life. These trains of ideas may with much pains and labour be
fixed in the memory, but they must be recalled precisely in the order
in which they were learnt by rote, and this is not the order in which
they may be wanted: they will be conjured up in technical succession,
or in troublesome multitudes.--Many people are obliged to repeat the
alphabet be