We may say, then, that _the pattern of memory is a discursive movement within fixed boundaries_; the boundaries are given by the set or background, as we have named it, by the fact (in other words) that we are recalling a particular situation or event; and the discursiveness reveals itself in roaming of attention and shift of ideas, which imply a variable activity of the associative tendencies. The characteristic processes are the _feeling of familiarity_ and the _imitative kinæsthesis_. § 43. =Mnemonics.=—Rules for remembering, tricks of memorising, were considered of great importance in the ancient world; oratory was highly esteemed; and no orator before the time of Augustus would have ventured to use notes. As the art declined, these rules were less and less regarded; we hear practically nothing of them between the first and the thirteenth centuries of the present era. From that date, however, interest in _artificial memory-systems_ has never died out; they have been recommended for sermons, for lectures, for disputations, for public speeches, for the learning of foreign languages, for examinations, for practically every occasion in which memory is employed, as well as for the improvement of memory itself. _The great principle of mnemonics is that you remember the novel and the disconnected by bringing it into arbitrary relation to the familiar and the connected._ Everybody, for instance, is thoroughly at home in his own house; the positions of the rooms are known, and their employment for the necessary purposes of the family holds them together. Suppose, then, that you are to deliver a speech, and that the speech has eight principal points. You think of yourself as entering the house: the first point you deposit in the hall, the second in the drawing-room, the third in the library, the fourth in the back hall, the fifth in the kitchen, the sixth in the pantry, the seventh in the dining-room, the eighth on the upstairs landing. You think of yourself as making the separate points in these different places; if possible, you invent some fanciful connection between the point and the place where you deposit it; if, for example, your second or drawing-room point is an historical reference, you might think of ‘drawing a hiss’ from your audience; anything will do, provided it is the sort of thing to stick! This local or _topographical way of memorising_ has always been popular; it is said that our ordinary phrases ‘in the first place,’ ‘in the second place,’ derive from it. _Number-alphabets_, in which certain letters stand for certain figures, are also much employed; dates, physical constants, statistical numbers, may thus be memorised. The _rhythm of verse_ has been appealed to; if you want to remember the seven cities that laid claim to the birth of Homer, you learn the hexameter-line ‘Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Salamis, Rhodos, Argos, Athenæ’; and you are helped—if further help is wanted—by the pattern of the initial letters SCCS-RAA.