But we cannot successfully eliminate and teach by itself that which is purely practical.  The easiest and surest why of acquiring facts is to learn them in groups, in systems, and systematized knowledge is science.  You can very often carry two facts fastened together more easily than one by itself, as a housemaid can carry two pails of water with a hoop more easily than one without it.  You can remember a man’s face, made up of many features, better than you can his nose or his mouth or his eye-brow.  Scores of proverbs show you that you can remember two lines that rhyme better than one without the jingle.  The ancients, who knew the laws of memory, grouped the seven cities that contended for the honor of being Homer’s birthplace in a line thus given by Aulus Gellius: 

Smurna, Rodos, Colophon, Salamin, Ios, Argos, Athenai.

I remember, in the earlier political days of Martin Van Buren, that Colonel Stone, of the “New York Commercial,” or one of his correspondents, said that six towns of New York would claim in the same way to have been the birth-place of the “Little Magician,” as he was then called; and thus he gave their names, any one of which I should long ago have forgotten, but which as a group have stuck tight in my memory from that day to this;

Catskill, Saugerties, Redhook, Kinderhook, Scaghticoke, Schodac.

If the memory gains so much by mere rhythmical association, how much more will it gain when isolated facts are brought together under laws and principles, when organs are examined in their natural connections, when structure is coupled with function, and healthy and diseased action are studied as they pass one into the other!  Systematic, or scientific study is invaluable as supplying a natural kind of mnemonics, if for nothing else.  You cannot properly learn the facts you want from Anatomy and Chemistry in any way so easily as by taking them in their regular order, with other allied facts, only there must be common sense exercised in leaving out a great deal which belongs to each of the two branches as pure science.  The dullest of teachers is the one who does not know what to omit.

The larger aim of scientific training is to furnish you with principles to which you will be able to refer isolated facts, and so bring these within the range of recorded experience.  See what the “London Times” said about the three Germans who cracked open John Bull Chatwood’s strong-box at the Fair the other day, while the three Englishmen hammered away in vain at Brother Jonathan Herring’s.  The Englishmen represented brute force.  The Germans had been trained to appreciate principle.  The Englishman “knows his business by rote and rule of thumb”—­science, which would “teach him to do in an hour what has hitherto occupied him two hours,” “is in a manner forbidden to him.”  To this cause the “Times” attributes the falling off of English workmen in comparison with those of the Continent.