Memoranda, to arrange.--Paste all loose slips of MSS. into the pages of a
blank book; and stitch your memoranda books where they are torn; give
them to a bookbinder, at the first opportunity, to re-bind and page them,
adding an abundance of blank leaves. Write an index to the whole of your
MSS.; put plenty of cross-references, insert necessary explanations, and
supplement imperfect descriptions, while your memory of the events
remains fresh. It appears impossible to a traveller, at the close of his
journey, to believe he will ever forget its events, however trivial; for
after long brooding on few facts, they will seem to be fairly branded
into his memory. But this is not the case; for the crowds of new
impressions, during a few months or years of civilised life, will efface
the sharpness of the old ones. I have conversed with men of low mental
power, servants and others, the greater part of whose experiences in
savagedom had passed out of their memories like the events of a dream.
Alphabetical Lists.--Every explorer has frequent occasion to draw up long
catalogues in alphabetical order, whether of words for vocabularies, or
of things that he has in store: now, there is a right and a wrong way of
setting to work to make them. The wrong way is to divide the paper into
equal parts, and to assign one of them to each letter in order. The right
way is to divide the paper into parts of a size proportionate to the
number of words in the English language which begin with each particular
letter.
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