Put an idea into your intelligence and leave it there an hour, a day, a year, without ever having occasion to refer to it.
When, at last, you return to it, you do not find it as it was when acquired.

It has domiciliated itself, so to speak,--become at home,--entered into relations with your other thoughts, and integrated itself with the whole fabric of the mind .-- Or take a simple and familiar example; Dr.Carpenter has adduced it.

You forget a name, in conversation,--go on talking, without making any effort to recall it,--and presently the mind evolves it by its own involuntary and unconscious action, while you were pursuing another train of thought, and the name rises of itself to your lips.
There are some curious observations I should like to make about the mental machinery, but I think we are getting rather didactic.
-- I should be gratified, if Benjamin Franklin would let me know something of his progress in the French language.

I rather liked that exercise he read us the other day, though I must confess I should hardly dare to translate it, for fear some people in a remote city where I once lived might think I was drawing their portraits.
-- Yes, Paris is a famous place for societies.

I don't know whether the piece I mentioned from the French author was intended simply as Natural History, or whether there was not a little malice in his description.