years. What shall these habits be? Reading and study must occupy a large part of the physician's spare time. He should form the habit of extracting the important items from a mass of unimportant detail. Certain general principles apply, whether it be a current magazine or an exhaustive treatise. Euclid is credited with the saying, "There is no royal road to geometry." Yet there is a royal habit to be cultivated, which will make the road easy to the acquisition of any subject. Nearly every book has a preface and a table of contents. Many people form the very bad habit of skipping both. This plunges one into the details of a subject without any comprehensive view. The logical habit is just the reverse. A general idea of a subject as a whole is the first essential.

One can seldom do better than to commence with the title-page, which furnishes information about the author, his position in the professional world, and some hint as to the reliability of his statements. The table of contents gives in a broad way the matter presented, and, what is also of equal importance, the logical sequence of the data and argument. Intelligent reading is said to be wise skipping, but wise skipping requires a general grasp, else the skipping is a dangerous habit. This habit will ensure the student against plodding thru a mass of detail, which he soon forgets because he fails to see its relation to the whole. The secret of remembering is this. Details are important only as they cluster

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around and attach themselves to the main thoughts. This method of study will enable one to retain.

An educated man has been defined as "one who knows where to go to get information." This is in distinction from the person whose brain is full of jumbled incoherent facts. The relationship between phenomena should be carefully noted, perhaps it would be better to say the relationships between different sets of phenomena. Let them all be concatenated, then recollection becomes literally a recollection. One idea suggests another with which we have associated it, and so on thru the series. It is only necessary to remember the beginning of the chain, and the rest is suggested. This is the principle in most of the so-called "memory helps."

But above all is it necessary to read understandingly. One chapter read well is better than the whole book read badly. Evidently each man's ability to digest a given subject will depend upon his education and previous habit. Emerson has said: "He must take himself for better for worse as his portion, though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till."

The economic value of intellectual habits becomes apparent when it is understood that habits of mind, as well as of body functions, are soon relegated to the domain of the subconscious. Idiosyncrasies of Essay on Self-reliance.

thinking and talking are so much a matter of common experience that the importance of the subject has been very generally overlooked. The next time you are at a club meeting and some one is called upon to discuss a paper, it will be of interest to you to forecast and predict, not only the little mannerisms of address and phraseology, yes, even the argumentative machinery.

of

You may not know this man's opinion on the special subject at hand, but if he be a person to whom you have often listened, you can safely infer his method of taking up the subject. The relationships any fact are so numerous, that one is almost sure to see this thing from the same point of view, as on other occasions he has seen other things. And the interesting part of it all is that the man himself seldom realizes that he has well-defined campaign plans ready made for all ordinary occasions.

The soldier knows, unconsciously (if you will allow that a thing can be known unconsciously), just what maneuvers a certain charge or retreat demand. His whole education from private to officer is a recognition of this principle. The story is told of an old soldier going home with his dinner. Altho having long since retired from service, the old subconscious habit was so strong, that when some one shouted "Attention!" his arms came down to the sides and his dinner dropped to the gutter. The ordinary explanation would be that he did it "without thinking." This is not far from the truth, if it

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be added that he did it because he had previously thought and acted this way.

SUBLIMINAL CEREBRATION

It is such facts as these which have led to theory of "unconscious cerebration." A more modern name is the subconscious mind. The word subliminal is also used by some psychologists. To understand its applicability it should be dissected. The root is the Latin limen (a threshold). Threshold in metaphysics has come to mean the smallest stimulus to which a given sense organ will respond, for example, the lowest tone, about sixteen vibrations to the second, of which the ear is conscious, is the threshold of sound.

So in psychology subliminal means under conscious or subconscious. It is conceived that the mind is divisible, not by a hard and fast anatomical line, but physiologically into the conscious and subconscious.

The reflexes belong to the subconscious, they are actions laboriously thought out by prehistoric individuals, transmitted as impulses or mental grooves to posterity, with their automatic machinery in perfect running order.

It was said that the cleavage was physiological, but this does not mean that it is absolute. Many actions are ordinarily subconscious, yet are under control of the will, if given conscious attention. Individuals vary greatly in the classification of their actions, those which are subconscious in one being

impossible save by conscious thought in others. Moreover, in the same individual there is a constant shifting of the dividing line.

THE MOMENT CONSCIOUSNESS

The experiences of the moment, which Sidis calls the "Moment Consciousness," consist of that of which we are directly conscious, the fact upon which the attention is fixed, and all the other environmental facts which are also perceived by the senses. These impressions may not be intense enough to rise into consciousness, and yet are indelibly registered in the subconscious. The next moment another cluster of sensations is perceived, and a large part, perhaps all, of the content of the previous "moment consciousness" becomes subconscious.

The reverse of this process is equally true, subconscious memories by association loom up into consciousness, both prompting and modifying in a thousand ways the sensations of the conscious. As life experiences multiply, the stored up facts increase. The content of the present" moment consciousness" includes the essence of all previous " moments consciousness."

Moreover, it must not be assumed that a subconscious memory must rise into consciousness in order that it shall become an active factor. Cases of hallucination studied by Doctor Sidis show that ofttimes some forgotten psychic shock is sufficient to give rise to the mental aberration. This leads Sidis