The St. Johns herald., 1889-08-01
MARvsLous MEMORIES.
What sEen EIay Do Who 4As~itiuousIy Gull
 tivate Their Memories.

Mr. Stanton. the United States War Min
 ister during the great civil war, had very
 retentive memory, and was especially well
 up in Dickens works. One evening, says a
 writer in ITelcome, in the early part of 1868,
 Dickens, then on Q reading tour in tue
 States, was dining with Charles Sumner
 when MT. Stanton and some others were
 present. The War Minister was put to the
 test, and when started could repeat from
 memory a chapter of any of Dickens
 books, showing q 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 "Pickwick'' before going to
 bed at night. The late Bishop Prince Lee, first Bishop of Manchester, was similarly
 gifted. It is related of him that being once, at an evening party, started by lady with a line quoted from "MarmIon," he went right on with the poem from memory, and
 could have recited the whole. As further test, the same lady quoted few words from conversation in ''IyanhOe," where upon the Bishop repeated the whole chapter correctly from memory. But greater than any of these was Lord Macaulay. From a very early age the retentive- ness of his memory was extraordinary. When only three or four years of age his mind mechanically retained the form of what he read so that, as his maid said, he talked ''Quite printed words" Once as child, when making an afternoon call with his father, he picked up Scott's Hay of the Last Minstrel" for the first time, and quietly GevCured the treasure while his seniors were engaged in cOnversa- tion. When they returned home the boy went to hls mother, who at the time was confined to her be1, and sitting down at the bedside repeated what he had been reading, by the canto, until she was tired. Later in life his wonderful memory was always a subject of interest to his friends and occa- sionally was put to searching tests. One day at board meeting at the British Museum Macaulay wrote down from memory in three parallel columns on each of four pages of fOolscGp Q complete list of the Cam bridge senior wranglers, with dates and col leges attached, for the one hundred years during which arecord of the names had been kept in the University calendar. "On an- other occasion,' says Trcvelyan, "Sir David Dundas asked: 'Macaulay, do you know your Popes' Nc was the answer, I al- ways get wrong among the Innoc ents.' But, can you say your Archbshops of Canter- bury?' Amy fool said Macaulay, could say his Archbishops of Canterbury back ward,' and he went off at score, drawing breath only once in order to remark on the oddity of their having been both an Arch bishop Saucroft and an nArchbishop Bancroft, until Sir David stopped him Gt Cranmer." Macaulay once said that if, by any possible oil tn of Da and the 'Phgrim's Progress Tn 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, Mir. Tennant, member of Parliament for Belfast, delivered speech lasting for three and q half hours, full of fig ures and calculations, entirely from mem- ory, in which he trusted so completely that he sent the manuscript of his speech to the newspapers before he delivered it. His confidence was not misplaced, for the ora tion was spoken without single mistake, or even momcntary hesitation. Another Irish M. P, Mr. Robert Dillon Brown, mem- ber for Mayo, haI the same useful faculty. He would dictate speech to an Gmanuensis, and twenty-four hours afterwards, without looking at it or thinking of the matter in the meantime could repeat it word for word. Woodfall, editor of the Morning Chronicle, and brother of JuniUs' publisher, was able to report accurately in the morn ing the debate of the previous evening with out taking any notes. In some cases the mental action involved in feats of this nat ure would seem to be quite mechanical and unintclligent. In the newspapers of Jan- uary, 1920, there are accounts of an eXtraor- dinary man, w;lo was known aS :" Memory corner Thompson" This man, although he could hardly remember any thing he heard, could yet retain perfectly the names and de- scriptions of large collections of objects that met his eye. He could take an inventory of the contents of house from cellar to attic merely by surveying them, and could afterWGrd write 1t out from mem- ory. He could draw from recollec- tion accurate plans of many Lon don parishes and districts, with every street, alley, public building, public house, etc, duly noted, down to the minutest typographical detail such as pumps, trees, bow-windows and posts. all correctly marked. Conspicuous instances of this me- chanical kind of memory are to be found among the famous mental calculatorS. Jed ediah Buxton was Q celebrity of this kind about the mddlc of the last century. He had but little education and, indeed, was not able to write lis own name. But in arithmetic and in abStruse calculations his powers were wonderful. The following is specimen. of the problems which, when put to the test, he solved mentally in few minutes: Find how many cub-cal eIghths of an inch there are m a Quadrangular mass 23l45,7s9 yards long, 2,642,732 yards wide and 54,955 yards thick. When in London in l154 he was taken to see Gar rick as Richard H. 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 1872, was q similar phenomenon. He had 1 no knowledge Of the rules of arithmetic, and was quite unable to explain how he ar rived at the answers to the problems sub- | mitted to hun. Mental power of this nat ure would seem to imply an unwholesome l development of one part of the brain at the | expense of the rest.
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