The trouble with most of you is that you have been looking without seeing--gazing but not observing. The objects around you have been out of your mental focus. If you will but change your mental focus, by means of will and attention, you will be able to cure yourself of the careless methods of seeing and observing that have been hindrances to your success. You have been blaming it on your memory, but the fault is with your perception. How can the memory remember, when it is not given anything in the way of clear impressions? You have been like young infants in this matter--now it is time for you to begin to "sit up and take notice," no matter how old you may be. The whole thing in a nut-shell is this: In order to remember the things that pass before your sight, you must begin to _see with your mind_, instead of with your retina. Let the impression get beyond your retina and into your mind. If you will do this, you will find that memory will "do the rest." CHAPTER X. TRAINING THE EAR. The sense of hearing is one of the highest of the senses or channels whereby we receive impressions from the outside world. In fact, it ranks almost as high as the sense of sight. In the senses of taste, touch, and smell there is a direct contact between the sensitive recipient nerve substance and the particles of the object sensed, while in the sense of sight and the sense of hearing the impression is received through the medium of waves in the ether (in the case of sight), or waves in the air (in the sense of hearing.) Moreover in taste, smell and touch the objects sensed are brought into direct contact with the terminal nerve apparatus, while in seeing and hearing the nerves terminate in peculiar and delicate sacs which contain a fluidic substance through which the impression is conveyed to the nerve proper. Loss of this fluidic substance destroys the faculty to receive impressions, and deafness or blindness ensues. As Foster says: "Waves of sound falling upon the auditory nerve itself produces no effect whatever; it is only when, by the medium of the endolymph, they are brought to bear on the delicate and peculiar epithelium cells which constitute the peripheral terminations of the nerve, that sensations of sound arise."