In the majority of cases it can be safely said that students spend at least two years of their college course in learning the most proper and convenient system of note-taking. Very few men have the necessary ingenuity or patience to work out for themselves in a few weeks a satisfactory method of taking down the most important points of any course, for example, in science or history. In most cases indeed no satisfactory method is arrived at even after four years of experiment. It seems somewhat strange, therefore, when we consider how much stress is laid nowadays upon the use of laborsaving devices in departments both of mental and of material labor, that so little attention on the whole is paid to this subject. It can justly be said indeed that many of our courses are but attempts to train the mind in methods of mental labor and of scientific investigation. An outline and a bibliography of a subject is all that often can be attempted in these days of rapid differentiation in departments of knowledge. The fact that so little attention is paid by the college and by the majority of professors to the giving of instruction and aid in this more material department of the intellectual life is perhaps explained by the comparatively recent emancipation of the college from former traditional and set methods of note and text-book instruction. It is but lately, since the introduction of the lecture system, that the subject of note-taking, involving as it does incidentally the questions of the systematization of mental methods and the acquisition of scientific and independent habits of study, has become of importance.

We should therefore think it quite within the province of the college, either by means of any general lectures or printed suggestions on the subject, or through the detailed suggestions of individual instructors in the lecture-room, to endeavor to aid students in acquiring right methods of study.