It is unhappily true that books do not teach the use of books. The art of extracting what is important or instructive in any book, from the mass of verbiage that commonly overlays it, cannot be learned by theory. Invaluable as the art of reading is, as a means of enlightenment, its highest uses can only be obtained by a certain method of reading, which will separate the wheat from the chaff. Different readers will, of course, possess different capacities for doing this. Young or undisciplined minds can read only in one way,--and that way is, to mentally pronounce every word, and dwell equally upon all the parts of every sentence. This comes naturally in the first instance, from the mere method of learning to read, in which every word is a spoken symbol, and has to be sounded, whether it is essential to the sense, or not. This habit of reading, which may be termed the literal method, goes with most persons through life. Once learned, it is very hard to unlearn. There are multitudes who cannot read a newspaper, even, without dwelling upon every word, and coming to a full stop at the end of every sentence. Now this method of reading, while it may be indispensable to all readers at some time, and to some readers at all times, is too slow and fruitless for the student who aims to absorb the largest amount of knowledge in the briefest space of time. Life is too short to be wasted over the rhetoric or the periods of an author whose knowledge we want as all that concerns us. Doubtless there are classes of literature in which form or expression predominates, and we cannot read poetry, for example, or the drama, or even the higher class of fiction, without lingering upon the finer passages, to get the full impression of their beauty. In reading works of the imagination, we read not for ideas alone, but for expression also, and to enjoy the rhythm and melody of the verse, if it be poetry, or, if prose, the finished rhetoric, and the pleasing cadence of the style. It is here that the literary skill of an accomplished writer, and all that we understand by rhetoric, becomes important, while in reading for information only, we may either ignore words and phrases entirely, or subordinate them to the ideas which they convey. In reading any book for the knowledge it contains, I should as soon think of spelling out all the words, as of reading out all the sentences. Just as, in listening to a slow speaker, you divine the whole meaning of what he is about to say, before he has got half through his sentence, so, in reading, you can gather the full sense of the ideas which any sentence contains, without stopping to accentuate the words.