Jump to content

Page:California Digital Library (IA improvedsystemof00cogl).pdf/54

From Wikisource
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

42

CHAP. IV.


AS it may be frequently necessary to commit to memory a series of figures, we shall now explain the mnemonical mode to facilitate this purpose. Various methods may be adopted, but we shall commence with the simplest, and for most purposes of a similar nature, perhaps the best.

6 5 9 2 4 9 7 6 4 8 1 5 2 6 0 1 8 2

Here are eighteen figures, that to many persons would require no common application to remember them; and after all their efforts, they would be very easily forgotten; but by using the mnemonical mode, the students can, not only recollect them in a much shorter time than the common method, (for by a little practice, a person could commit them to memory in less than a minute) but gain the more important point of permanently fixing them—their first step towards effecting this, is to divide the figures into pairs, and make them into words, but as the words so made, require to be recollected, they must associate them with the symbols, and proceed regularly on from the first, to as many as they require.

Agreeably to this direction, let them take 65, which they must make into a word; the figure 6 they know has the letters d and v to represent it, as 5 has l and j; by placing a vowel or vowels, between, before, or after a consonant that belongs to 6, and a consonant that belongs to 5, they have a great number of words at their disposal: they have deal, delay, dial, idle, veil, veal, vile, &c. &c. but as their object should be to make choice of a word that may have some relation, or affinity to the symbol, that they