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The remarkable strength of the verbal memory in students of the first two years of the secondary school is a fact by which every teacher must have been impressed.[2] Add to this fact the other, that the pupil’s social interests are now in a perfect renaissance of liveliness, and you have exactly the conditions for enlarging the working vocabulary. It is now or never. The boy, though like the man he hates a fine distinction in conversation, is growing out of the exaggerated reticence which has of late seemed to him the manly thing. He is no longer determined to employ what Mrs. Meynell, speaking of the boy of twelve, calls his “carefully shortened vocabulary.”[3] The girl, even more than the boy, is full of new ideas which would flower into speech if the words were to be had. To capture these new interests and satisfy them by literature is of course the best thing. Study of isolated words, whether for knowledge or for power, is but supplementary to the study of the vital functions of words in the living organism. But even the study of synonyms, if pursued in preparation for an oral debate,—one of the very best exercises for first-year students,—or in connection with a page of spirited prose, rapidly becomes constructive and vital. Although the chapters on vocabulary (ssss1 and ssss1) may be given before the student has begun a foreign language, the best results with them will not be secured until he has had at least six months in Latin. The study of prefixes and suffixes (p. 186 ff.) should not be made burdensome. Some general view of the subject seems desirable, but the detailed study is best given in connection with an interesting context.