Let's try and work through the recursive mergesort of a list of eight values.

The list is divided into two sublists.

Now let's work on the left sublist. It will be divided into lists of two.

Each list of two is now very easy to sort. After each list of two is sorted, we then merge these two lists back into a list of four.

Now the algorithm proceeds to solve the right sublist (positions 5-8) recursively. Then the two lists of four are merged back together.
