Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1909-04-04
By Denys p. Myers

| religions is memory
| above par Every Chi
nese scholar worthy of the name for two
Thousand years at least has known the Five
| Books of Confucius nearly by rote that
| if every copy was destroyed a thousand
could be taken Immediately from memory.
and the differences in text would be negligible
| The Five Books printed in many vol
umes and with the commentaries of Mencius
| make library in them elves; yet well are
they textually known among the literati that
| it is an insult-which we'll meaning foreigners
anxious to display their learning frequently
any of them except by the mention OF word
| or two The text of all is as well known to
the scholars as is the passage TO be or not
| to be to Shakespearean scholars.
| Macaulay once boosted that if Milton and
/ Eergil and Homer were destroyed the poets
| could be taken down verbatim again from
his dictation. About a thousand years ago
such necessity arose in China. A great En-
peror ordered the classics and commentaries
utterly DESTROYED Those who chung to their
books more than to their lives were executed
and their books burned. The catastrophe was
well nigh complete. The next Emperor. how
ever favored the learning of the hterati and
himself ordered the texts restored from the
memories of the learned. The catalogue OF
classic books includes more than thirtytwo
hundred titles in many thousands OF volumes,
and OF these very great many have been
preserved to posterity solely by the memories
| of those old men
Memorizine from the Bible
TODAY the Bible is the best memorized
| book in the world and no doubt it could
| be entirely reconstructed from the minds of
| its students. One young woman alone could
dictate the New Testament She is Miss Leste
MAY Williams of North Carolina. now twenty
years old Early in March, 1905. the Rev
!. A. Brendell, pastor of the local Baptist
church, offered two Bibles as prizes for mem
orizing of Scripture. The first was for
those over twelve years old, and the second
for those under that age.
committed and recited to the committee IL, 236
verses of scripture. covering the entire New
Testament excepting the two genealogleS OF
| Jesus in the first chapter OF Matthew and the
third chapter of Luke. and including liberal
selections from Genesis, Psalms. Ecclesiastes.
and other parts of the Old Testament The
| New Testament itself contains 1850 verses
and 100 600 words. Miss Williams sister Ella.
eleven years old, the prize for the
| younger children. reciting seven hundred and
| fifteen verses. The winner of the first prize
| performed her mnemonic feat in ninety days,
during which she had an attack OF the
measles. She had averaged about one hundred
and thirty-fve verses daily during her three
months of study.
| Colburn the Prodigy
THE most frequent cases OF wonderful mem
cries are found among mathematical prodi-
| ges. These usually develop their remarkable
| faculty quite young and in later life sink into
very ordinary individuals The phenomenon
has never been explained: but there sew
eral we'll attested instances of genuine marvels
of this kind.
Zerah Colburn was one such. At the age OF
six he could neither write nor cipher. and yet
could answer, apparently by mere intuition,
all sorts of arithmetical questions correctly
and instantly At eight he left the United
States to show in London. and there in a mo-
ment answered this question correctly. How
many minutes are there in eighty-four years."
| He added the number of seconds in the period
| Immediately on request He could not ex-
plain the mental process he used. and it may
have been simply a queer instinct. Young
| Colburn raised eight to the sixteenth power
mentally. and gave the answer as 2SI,474.o76,-
71o.6s6 without any hesitation whatever, and
| found the square root of 100000 to be S27
instantly. But he only prodigy.
John Wallis Feats
THE English mathematician John Wallis put
his exceptional faculty to some use. being
| an accomplished scientist in his day. His
| powers of mental computation may be illus
| trated by quoting from some of his letters to
| friends:
1 December ~, 1000. in dark night. in
bed without pen ink. paper or anything
equivalent l did by memory extract the
square root of 3.ooo, 900 900. 900. 900 900
| 900 .ooo 900 900 900. 900 900, which | found
| correctly, and did the next day commit it to
Il n MI