Apperception is no longer a word to conjure with in education. It has given away to more enticing, although no more significant terms. It is a pity that the introduction of the methods based on Herbartianism was not accompanied by careful scientific study of the way in which past experiences operate in determining the child's reaction to a new situa tion. That these past experiences must be taken into consideration is beyond question. To this extent the principle of apperception is sup ported by common sense, by data from experimental psychology, by the results of experiments in education, and even by the contributions of psychoanalysis. Indeed, there are published papers on psychoanalysis which, with slight changes in terminology, would have elicited no sur prise had they appeared thirty years ago under the title apperception. The prominence given to diagnostic and remedial teaching indicates that in the near future students of education will attach greatly increased im portance to the study of the past experiences of the learner as well as to his native endowments. The significance of past experiences in meeting new situations, as well as in responding to closely similar situations, can be made clearer if reduced to specific terms. Learning to spell is usually regarded as a relatively simple process. The writer has for some years used the supervision of spelling as the first unit in his course in research as ap plied to the supervision of instruction because the problems of selecting, organizing, and grading the course of study, as well as the problems of learning and testing the results of learning, seem to be more simple and concrete in the case of spelling than are the corresponding problems of research in other school subjects. He has come to wonder, however, whether the problems are so simple, even relatively, as they have been assumed to be. The discussion which follows is limited to the case of attempting to spell a word which, in so far as spelling is concerned, is a new problem to the child. It assumes that the word has neither been spelled nor read. The possible past experiences which may affect the child's responses in such a case may be grouped into five classes: (1) The study of spelling lessons which include words containing one or more of the same phonetic 47