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Day-dreaming, giving way to reverie and to casual fancy, too, is not to be regarded as study. Not because it is not well to indulge in such activity at times, but because it is not serious enough to be called work. Study is systematic work, and not play. Reading for recreation, further, is not study. It is certainly very desirable and even necessary, just as play is. It even partakes of many of the characteristics of true study, and reaps many of its benefits. No doubt, too, the extensive reading that children and youth now do might well partake more fully of the nature of study. It would result in more good and less harm; for, beyond a doubt, much careless reading is injurious to habits of serious study. Yet it would be intolerable to attempt to convert pleasure-reading fully into real study. That would mean that we had become too serious.

On the whole, then, the term study as here used has largely the meaning that is given to it in ordinary speech. Yet it is not entirely the same; the term signifies a purposive and systematic, and therefore a more limited, kind of work than much that goes under that name.

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The habit among eminent men of setting up specific purposes of study.

The scientific investigator habitually sets up hypotheses of some sort as guides in his investigations. Many distinguished men who are not scientists follow and recommend a somewhat similar method of study.

For example, John Morley, M.P., in his Aspects of Modern Study, [Footnote: Page 71.] says, "Some great men—Gibbon was one and Daniel Webster was another and the great Lord Strafford was a third—always, before reading a book, made a short, rough analysis of the questions which they expected to be answered in it, the additions to be made to their knowledge, and whither it would take them. I have sometimes tried that way of studying, and guiding attention; I have never done so without advantage, and I commend it to you." Says Gibbon [Footnote: Dr. Smith's Gibbon, p. 64.], "After glancing my eye over the design and order of a new book, I suspended the perusal until I had finished the task of self-examination; till I had resolved, in a solitary walk, all that I knew or believed or had thought on the subject of the whole work or of some particular chapter; I was then qualified to discern how much the author added to my original stock; and, if I was sometimes satisfied with the agreement, I was sometimes armed by the opposition of our ideas."