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desirous to return to it as often as any additional light can be shed upon it.

It is a common experience, if a difficult problem, or a theme to be discussed, is called before the mind and then passed by for a time, that the thoughts revert to it later with unexpected advantage; that a certain mastery of the topic seems to have been achieved in the interval. This new power, often very considerable, is referred to unconscious cerebration, a process of thought that has gone forward, as it were, in the substance of the brain. The moment the favorite and favorable words are dropped, the argument, it will be observed, loses probability. " Unconscious cerebration," guides the mind to the conclusion more smoothly than the equivalent expression a physical change in cerebral states. We have here the trick of a phrase. These gains of thought, we think, may be much more wisely ascribed to the frequent reversion of the mind to the subject, and its leisurely consideration of it in a variety of lights, though the times of such secondary occupation, extending over considerable periods and thrown into the shadow of other events, are not conspicuous in memory; indeed, like any transient under-current of thought, may have quite escaped it. Few of these interstitial states can we recall at the close of a week. If the topic is not a familiar one, does not lie in the line of our pursuits; if it is not a habit with us to return more or less frequently to a discussion once present to the mind, we shall find the gains of delay very slight. If, however, we are accustomed to restore a theme, to recast the thoughts at odd moments, and to gather new material as the process proceeds, then the yield of the under-drift will be correspondingly large. This fact, which is the significant feature of the general fact of acquisition by delay, shows that the mind does keep its intellectual garden in growth by indirect and unobtrusive,