Suggests that the contributions of H. Ebbinghaus to the study of memory, in order of decreasing importance, are methodological, empirical, and theoretical. It is proposed that the course of subsequent development might have been different had he studied item or associative information rather than serial-order information. His chaining mechanism has been cause for much criticism, but the fault may have been in his conceptualization of associations rather than the chaining hypothesis per se. (22 ref) (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)