=Danger in Mere Repetition.=--In connection with the repetition necessary in the second stage of the drill lesson, an important precaution should be noted. It is impossible for anybody to repeat anything _attentively_ many times in succession unless there is some new element noted in each repetition. When there is no longer a new element, the repetition becomes mechanical, and hence comparatively useless so far as acquisition of knowledge or even habit is concerned. To ask a pupil who has difficulty with a combination in addition, or a product in multiplication, or the spelling of a word, to repeat it many times in succession, may be not only waste of time, but even worse, because a tendency toward mind-wandering may be encouraged. The practice of requiring pupils to write out new words, or words that have been mis-spelled in the dictation lesson, five, ten, or twenty times successively, cannot be too strongly condemned. The attention cannot possibly be concentrated upon the work beyond two or three repetitions, and the fact that pupils frequently make mistakes two or three words down the column and repeat this mistake to the end, is sufficient proof of the mechanical nature of the process. The little boy who had difficulty with the use of "went" and "gone," and was commanded by his teacher to write "I have gone" a hundred times on his slate, illustrates this principle exactly. He had been left to finish his task alone and, after writing "I have gone" faithfully forty or fifty times, grew tired of the monotony of the process. Turning the slate over, he wrote on the other side, "I have went home" and left it on the desk for the teacher's approval. =How to Overcome Dangers.=--To avoid this difficulty, some device must be adopted to secure attention to each repetition until the knowledge is firmly fixed. For instance, instead of asking the pupil many times one after the other, what seven times six are, it would be better to introduce other combinations and come back frequently to seven times six. In that way the pupil would have to attend to it every time it came up. Similarly, in learning to spell a troublesome word like "separate," the best plan would be to mix it up with other words and come back to it often. Repetition is always necessary in the drill lesson, but it should always be _repetition with attention_. THE REVIEW LESSON =Purpose of Review Lesson.=--As the name implies, a review is a new view of old knowledge. While the drill lesson repeats the matter in the same form as it was originally learned, the review lesson repeats the matter from another standpoint or in new relations. The function of the review lesson is the organization of the material of a series of lessons into an inter-connected whole, and incidentally the fixing of these facts in the mind by the additional repetitions.