Many educators now-a-days are accustomed to speak slightly of the old-fashioned plan of committing to memory verses of Scripture, hymns, catechisms, creeds, and other formulas of doctrine and sentiment in religion and science. Many speak disparagingly even of memory itself, and profess to think it a faculty of minor importance, regarding its cultivation as savoring of old-fogyism, and sneering at all memoriter exercises among children as the chattering of parrots. It is never without amazement that I hear such utterances. Memory is God's gift, by which alone we are able to retain our intellectual acquisitions. Without it, study is useless, and education simply an impossibility. Without it, there could be no such thing as growth in knowledge. We could know no more to-day than we knew yesterday, or last week, or last year. The man would be no wiser than the boy. Without this faculty, the mind would be, not as now like the prepared plate which the photographer puts in his camera, and which retains indelibly on its surface the impressions of whatever objects pass before it; but would rather be like the window pane, before which passes from day to day the gorgeous panorama of nature, transmitting with equal and crystalline clearness the golden glory of the sun, the pale rays of the moon and stars, the soft green of meadow and woodland, images of beauty and loveliness, of light and shade, from every object on the earth and in the heavens; but retaining on its own surface not a line or a tint of the millions of rays that have passed through its substance, and remaining to the end the same bit of transparent glass, unchanged, unprofited by the countless changes it has received and transmitted. Memory alone gives value to the products of every other faculty, stamping them with the seal of possessorship, and making them truly ours. In vain reason forges its bolts, in vain imagination paints its scenes, in vain the senses give us a knowledge of the shapes and forms of external nature, in vain ideas of any sort or from any source come into our minds, unless we have the power to retain and fix them there, and make them a part of our accumulated intellectual wealth. To do this is the office of memory, and whatever increases the activity and power of the memory, gives at once value and growth to every other power.