The Sun.
London, England, 1841-09-11 00:00:00

MORNING SUN ,

LECTURE ON MNEMONICS 7
The metaphysicians of the schools have been long perk
plexed to give some determinate idea of the nature t.)
memory, but the latest and most sagacious of I,IIRII.
thinkers, Dugald Stewart, confessed it to be indelint,z,kr,;
Dr. Reid equally complained of its inexplicability'tsnu
said that memory was an original faculty, given its by3te -
Author of our being, and•he alone inspired man whit
t'
Kant, however, and his philosophic school, holvel.'„
transcendental. on other occasions, simply explains 1"
to be the result of a , combination: of ideas,
which have become imprinted upon the rec."
pient sense, and there retained. Memory •isi'ii.iid
fact, a purely mechanical process, and, however. crowt*,
it may become with filets and images, which,. it'll,
their greatest plenitude, create in the poet the higlieg
point of' intellectual attainment, which often persuades as
with a belief of supernatural inspiration, -et is it In !ts
profoundest form resolvable into simple ideas, which
have accumulated from infancy to inanhood.
A lecture delivered by. M. Beniowski on men-1010,
or the art of memory, yesterday evening, at the Lecture
Rooms, near Red Lion-square, furnished 'sufficient proof,
to an audience of more than 300 persons, of the powilst
of which mechanical memory is capable. , The firs
ninemonical experiment M. Beniowski advanced wits
very similar to that related by Muretur of the youPg
Corsican, who was able to repeat, after twice readiPg!
any number of words in any order. M. Benio4!'
however seVerely questioned by his audience, gaYT,ill
responses with scarce a failure, thOugh the stkie.°
recite
was of the roost: unconnected ' -and ipcOti3oi!
kind. A subsequent experiment was to' elte AW Ti' :
11
th)re r
loafnguunanageesanol
earth and
Ind words; stfreopeni,tittdittly,
i n.lt)oil
i,ii,ioa:
after a few ininutes', study, equalled!; foiti elivetbAi
and barbarism the Complete jargon into which-016*ml
was split at the divisionof Babel. The practical use °f
the mnemonic art, in this case, was felicitously,explainct.
and elucidated by the ' exhibitor. By its, aid,. no .1,g5
guage on earth but was easily to be, mastered, andlv'
Beniowski . adduced two singular instances in his own
life. ' Having shoWn his readiness, before the comp
of committing: to memory above twenty barbaric woo,'
in five minutes, he observed that the ratio was 011 Y
to be increased, to acquire any tongue. Scarce a WWI
language that exists contains more than seven or .eight
hundred radicals ; these obtained, all other difficer
ties are but secondary. " Four year's ago," said the kr
turer, "I started from France for .england. On °Pr-
barking at Calais, I was an absolute stranger to a SO::
monosyllable. I purchased a vocabulary and dictiov,;.rdeli
aided Ly my mnemonic principles, I learned the 10" le
your English language before I had crossed the Chantle 'a,
The foreign accent of the lecturer, it should be observe
was scarcely perceptible, and his fluency in English es.
cellent.
Again, said M. Beniowski, some years back I was de'
spatched by the French Government on a foreign COl:
mission to Egypt. Before starting from Marseilles, I „
Paris, my teacher of mnemonics, said to me, ,' Do ).1);
know anything of Arabic?" "Not a syllable," answere°
Beniowski; " but," continued he, " before I r?a.ched o,le
gates of Alexandria I knew enough to convince She
natives I was neither deaf nor dumb." lof
The experiments. so far as regarded words, werf,,,44 •
themselves-surprising ; but the wonder greatly incret9-ii
when M. Beniowski challenged the company tO'qutlllo 0
him on entire works. Venerable Homer was to bif4,4 ta
touch-stone, and the powers of the lecturer's menA
was to be evinced by reciting any line of the s°%f
hundred and eighty which compose the first book -„
the Iliad. No sooner did any one present pror-;t
to know the number of the line, where the lingua
old writer sings of " ox-eyed venerable Juno," no sn°ll`,l
was " rosy-checked Briscis" mentioned, or " swift-footfe
Achilles," or " Vulcan pouring out the nectar, while t"
Gods all laugh," than the number of the line was sirs
swered, or, in answer to the appellant's number, w,,g.
given the corresponding line. After this, our astoni"4 •
went witnessed further feats in regard to upwards of to
thousand chronological events, gathered either fr°l:',.
Usher or Eusebius, which were answered by the eager,
menter from fact to date, or from, date to fact. Nazi` rof
tables of Logarithms, of which every page is a forest t,
figures, seemed child's-play to the lecturer to recouo.
Since the days of Francis Suarez or Lipsius, the forl,
of whom is immortalised by his ability to repeat all -0,,
Augustine's works by heart, and the latter by his ch
membrance of the whole of Tacitus, a memory of stlio
capacity and wonderful mechanical capabilities as t •
lecturer's, has not, we may say boldly, appeared. .d
But the keys of this invaluable, nay, even magl.lo,
science, are conveyed with equal ease to any of his Old
one of whom appeared before the audience, and exhibit
before them the result of only four hours' study---4 u„l f
cult chronological task—and the readiness and truth of
his answers was astonishing. M. Feinagle, who cre3te.
La'
so great a seasation in England some years ago b)
po
milar mnemonic experiments, certainly, has found
mean competitor in the person of M. Beniowski.

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