The results just given may be compared with those obtained when =meaningful stimuli= are employed. Thus, 8 or 9 one-syllable words, and 10 to 12 one-place numbers, can be recited after a single reading. Meaningful material, which is grouped or unified by its topic, may be learned ten times as quickly as meaningless syllables. It may also be presented more rapidly; iambic and trochaic verses, for instances, may be taken at double the rate of the syllables. Dates of historical events, and the words of a foreign language, are best learned like the meaningless syllables; and connected meaningful material, like a poem or an oration, should very decidedly be read as a whole, from end to end, in the successive repetitions. If there are brief passages of unusual difficulty, they may, of course, be gone over by themselves, in the intervals between the total readings; the general rule, however, is to learn by wholes. This appears, in fact, to be the procedure generally followed by bards and tellers of folktales; and actors who play many rôles in quick succession are able to ‘wing a part,’ as the phrase goes, by reading it through several times over at brief intervals. Children who memorise a poem in sections, a stanza now and a stanza to-morrow, waste a great deal of time. Let us now come back to the =meaningless syllables=, and ask what is _the net result of all the influences_ that we have listed. Suppose, in other words, that a series of syllables has been presented at a certain rate, thrown into a certain rhythm, repeated a certain number of times with fitting distribution in time, recited at every repetition: what is the final outcome, as regards the establishment of associative tendencies in the brain? It is this: _that a strong connection has been set up between the successive terms of the series, in the order of their presentation; and that weaker connections have been set up between every term and every other term, whether the terms are near or remote in the series, and whether they are taken forwards or backwards_. Let us illustrate by reference to the alphabet. If the alphabet represents a series of meaningless syllables, then there is a strong connection between _a_ and _b_, _b_ and _c_, ... _y_ and _z_; but there are also weaker connections between _a_ and _d_, ... _v_ and _z_; and further, there are connections backward between _z_ and _y_, _z_ and _x_, ... _d_ and _a_. The series of syllables has thus impressed the brain with _a very complex meshwork of associative tendencies_, stronger in some places (direct forward connection) and weaker in others (remote and backward connection), but still functionally interconnected through all its parts.