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derives no assistance from association. Even when the influence of association is most manifest, it is only the order of the conceptions which can be accounted for by it, not their actual restitution to the mind. The power to do this work still remains simple and primitive. We need, therefore, no doctrine of latent states to account for the remote character of two facts reported by the memory; nor a belief in a great crowd of thoughts, always present to the mind, of only a small number of which we are distinctly conscious, in order to explain the celerity with which memory produces an appropriate event, or matter pertinent to our state of feeling, or to the argument in hand. The conception that the memory has already partially evoked from limbo a great crowd of facts, and is moving among them as so many personae dramatis, making ready by various laws of association to produce the next fit player on the open stage of consciousness, entirely transcends the facts, is no more intelligible, is less simple, than the statement nakedly accepted, that memory, under the suggestion of a direct question put by a stranger, or at the intimation of the thoughts with which the mind itself is occupied, can directly reach and repeat pertinent previous experiences, and thus enable us to regain, without constantly maintaining, former phases of activity. In many of the connections of association, there is no potency whatever wherewith to restore a missing member, except as memory gives them that potency.

Strength of memory depends much on original endowment, though this faculty is as readily cultivated as any of our powers. It comes to do what we patiently insist on its doing. The acquisition of a few names in botany or in ornithology may at the outset be very difficult, yet in the end memory may retain many hundreds with comparative ease. In extemporary discourse the line of thought comes by