great many explorers have been busy with it, and a search-light has been thrown into some of its dark places. Thanks to them we have learned that this is the great storehouse of the brain—the place where things are kept for future use. It has many storage-places, and they are very elastic. They grow with the demand on their resources, and perfectly new chambers are built in when the demand for them exists. The eye, the ear, the nose, the skin, all have their own storerooms here, and what comes in through these senses is piled up in its own place as memories—reminiscences laid away, not on wooden shelves, however, but in rafts of living cells, and capable at any moment of being launched with great éclat into the vortex of the higher brain life. Here is the home of the subconscious mind. It can be readily seen why it is not well to examine too much, to interfere when a child is thoughtful or absorbed, or at play, or even idling.
In later ages,as we have seen, perfectly new memory chambers have been formed in the brain—centres for word-sounds, for example, and for written symbols. And some probably that were once wide are now shrinking a little, for it would seem that neglected brain-shelves tend to disappear. (Mrs. Boole says that the children of ancient Greece had an instinct
