How often have you heard people say: "I forget his name; it is something like Beadle or Beagle—at any rate it begins with a B." Each and all of these were unconscious Loisettians, and they were practicing blindly, and without proper method or direction, the excellent system which he teaches. The thing, then, to do—and it is the final and simple truth which Loisette teaches—is to travel over this ground in the other direction—to cement the fact which you wish to remember to some other fact or word which you know will be brought out by the implied conditions—and thus you will always be able to travel from your given starting point to the thing which you wish to call to mind.
To illustrate: let the broken line in the annexed diagram represent a train of thought. If we connect the idea "a" with "e" through the steps b, c and d, the tendency of the mind ever afterward will be to get to e from a that way, or from any of the intermediates that way. It seems as though a channel were cut in our mindstuff along which the memory flows. How to make it flow this way will be seen later on. Loisette, in common with all mnemonic teachers, uses the old devise of representing numbers by letter—and as this is the first and easiest step in the art, this seems to be the most logical place to introduce the accepted equivalents of the Arabic numerals:
0 is always represented by s, z or c soft.
1 is always represented by t, th or d.
2 is always represented by n.
3 is always represented by m.
4 is always represented by r.
5 is always represented by l.
6 is always represented by sh, j, ch soft or g soft.