St. Paul daily globe. [volume] (Saint Paul, Minn.) 1884-1896, 1888-08-26
MARVELLOUS MEMORIES.
People Who Could Read the
Globe Through Once and Then
Write 1t All Out Without Hest

OAOOO OHCO duu
Write 1t All Out Without Hest
tatiOn.
/. Mr.. Stanton, the United States war
minister during the great Civil war,
had very retentive memory, and was
especially well up in Dickens works.
One evening IN the early part
of 1868 Dickens. then on a read
Charles Sumner. when Mr.. Stanton and
some others were present. The war
minister was put to the test, and
when started could repeat from
memory a chepter from any of
Dickens books, showing much
greater knowledge of the works than
| their author could boast. Mr.. Stanton
/ accounted for this intimate knowledge
/ of Dickens by mentioning the habit
which he had formed during the war of
invariably reading something by the
author OF s'Pickwick," before going to
bed at night.
: The late Bishop Prince Lee, first
bishop of Manchester. was similarly
gifted. 1t is reported of him that being
once, at an evening party, started by
lady with line quoted from
.'"Marmion," he went right on with
the poem from memory, and could have
irecited the whole. AS further test
the same lady quoted few words from
conversation in Ivanhoe, whereupon
the bishop repeated the whole chapter
correctly from memory.
But greater than any of these was
Lord Macaulay. From very early
age the retentiveness of his memory
or four years of age his mind mechanic
ally retained the form of what he read,
SO that, as his maid said, he
talked "quite printed words" Once as
a child, when making an afternoon call
with his father, he picked up Scott's
"Lay of the Last Minstrel" for the
| first time, and quietly devoured the
| treasure while his seniors were en-
| gagged in conversation. When they
| returned home the boy went to his
mother, who at the time was confined to
| her bed. and sitting down by the bed
| side repeated what he had been reading,
| by the canto, until she was tired.
Later in life his wonderful memory
was always subject of interest to
his friends and occasionally was put
| to searching tests. One day at a
board meeting at the British Museum
| Macaulay wrote down from memory
| in three parallel columns on each of
four pages of fOolscap a complete list of
the Cambridge senior wranglers, with
dates and colleges attached, for the 100
years during which a record of the
names had been kept in the university
calendar.
''On another OCCASION" says Trevel-
yam. "Sir David Dundas asked. Ma
caulay, do you know your Popes?' No.
was the answer, L always get wrong
among the Innocents.' But can you
| say your archbiShops of Canter-
bury?' ANY FOOL said Macaulay,
could say his archbishops of Canterbury
BACKWARD and he went off at score,
drawing breath only once in order to
remark on the oddity of there having
been both an Archbishop Sancrost and
an Archbishop Bancroft until Sir
David stopped him at Gran
mer." Macaulay once said that if by
any possibly chance all the copies of
Paradise Lost and the Pilgrims Pro
| gresS in existence were destroyed, he
could write both out again complete
from recollection.
| When O'Connell made his motion in
1884 for the repeal of the union Mr..
Tenant. member of parliament for
| Belfast, delivered speech lasting
for three and half hours, full
of figures and calculations entirely
from memory, in which he trusted
so completely that he sent the manu-.
script of his speech to the newspapers
was not misplaced, for the Grafton was
spoken without a single mistake, or
even mOmentary hesitation.
Another Irish M. P, Robert Dillon
I Brown, member for Mayo, had the same
useful faculty. He would dictate a
speech to an amannenSiS, and twenty
four hours afterward, without looking
at it or thinking of the matter in the
meantime, could repeat it word for
| word.
T. Woodfall, the editor of the Morning
| Chronicle and brother of Junius' pub
Usher, was able to report accurately in
the morning the debate of the previous
evening without taking any notes.
In some cases the mental action in
vOlved in teatS of this nature would
seem to be quite mechanical and unin-
telligent. In the newspapers of Janu-
| airy, 1920, there are accounts of an eX-
traordinary man, who was known as
"Memory-Corner Thompson" This
man, although he could hardly re-
member anything he heard, could yet
retain perfectly the names and descrip-
| tons of large collections of objects
that met his eye. He could take an in
| ventOry of the contents of a house
| from cellar to attic merely by sur
veying them, and could afterward write
| 1T out from memory. He could
| draw from recollection accurate plans of
many London parishes and districts,
| with every street, alley, public building,
| public house, ETC.. duly noted, down to
the mfnutest Typographical details, such
as pumps, trees, bOw-WindOWS and
| posts, all correctly marked.
Conspicuous instances of this mechan-
| ical kind of memory are to be found
| among the famous mental calculators,
Jedediah Buxton was celebrity of this
| kind about the middle of the last CEN
| fury. He had but little education, and
| indeed was not able to write his own
| name. But in arithmetic and in alb
| struse calculations his powers were
wonderful. The following is a speci-
| men of the problems which when put to
the test, he solved mentally in few min
utes: Find how many cubical eighths of
an inch there are in quadiangular mass
measuring %, 145,7S9 yards long, 2.642,-
1872 yards wide and s., 965 yards thick.
to see Garrick as Richard III. at Drury
Lane The play did not interest him,
but he occupied himself in reckoning
the number of words he heard and in
counting the number of steps made by
the dancers.
The American boy, Zerah Colburn.
who came to London in 1912, was SIM
liar phenomenon. He had no knowl-
edge of the rules of arithmetic, and was
quite unable to explain how he
arrived at the answers to the
problems submitted to him. Mental
power of this nature would seem to i'm
ply an unwhOlesome development of
one part of the brain at the expense of
the rest. The retentiveness of such a
memory as Lord Macaulay's is greatly
to be preferred to the abnormal mental