Rensselaer Republican, Volume 21, Number 17, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 December 1888 — MARVELOUS MEMORIES. [ARTICLE]

MARVELOUS MEMORIES.

What Men May Do Who Cultivate Their Faculties. Welcome. - ' ' Mr. Stanton, the United States War Minister during the great civil war, had a very retentive metnOry, and was especially WH uptnDickens’works. One evening in the early part of 1868 Dickens, then on a reading tour in the States, was dining with 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 chapter from any of Dickens’ books showing a much greater knowledge of the works than their author could boast. Mr. Stanton accounted for this intimiate 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 bi him that being once, at an evening party, started by a lady with a line quoted from “Marmion,” he went right on with the poem from memory, and could have recited the whole. As a further test, the same lady quoted a few words from a conversation in “Ivanhoe,” whereupon the Bishop repeated the whole chapter correctly from memory. But greater than any of these was Lord Macaulay. From a very eerly age the retentiveness of his memory was extraordinary. When only 3' or 4 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 fattier, he picked up Scott’s “Lay of the Last Minstrel” for the first time, and quietly devoured the treasure while his seniors were engaged in conversation. When they returned home the boy went to his mother; w ho at the time was confined to her bed. and sitting down at the bedside repeated what be had been reading, by the canto, until she was tired. Later in life his wonderful memory was alv ays a subject of interest to his friends, and occasionally was put to searching tests. One day at a board meeting of 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 Trevolyan, “Sir David Dundas asked: ‘Mulcaulay, do you know vour Popes?’ “No,” was the answer, “I always get wrong among the Innocents.’ ‘But, can you say your Archbishops of .Canterbury?’ ‘Any fooi,’ said Macaulay, ‘could say his Archbishops of Canterbury backward,’ and he went off at a score, di awing breath only once in order to remark on the oddity of there having been both an Archbishop Sancroft, until Sir Davis stopped him at Cranmer.” Macaulay once said that if, by any possible chance, all the copies of “Paradise Lost and the “Pilgrims Progress” in existence were destroyed, he could write both out again, complete, from, recollection. When O’Connell made his motion in 1634 for the repeal of the union, Mr. Tennant, member of the Parliment for Belfast, delivered a speech lasting for three and a hall hours, full of figures and calculations, entirely from memory, 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 oration was spoken without a single mistake, or even a momentary hesitation. Another Irish M. P., Mr. Robert Dillon Brown, member for Mayo, had the same useful faculty. He would dictate a speech to an amanuensis, and twenty-four hours afterwards, without looking at it or without thinking of the matter in the meantime, could repeat it word for word. Woodfall, the editor of the Morning Chronicle, and, brother of Junius’ publisher, was able to report accurately in the morning** the debate of the previous evening without taking any notes. In some cases the mental action involved in feats of this nature would seem to be quite mechanical and unintelligent. In the newspapers of January, 1820, there are accounts of an extraordinary man, who was known as “Memory-

comer Thompson.” This man,although he could hardly remember anything he heard, could yet retain perfectly the names and descriptions of large collections of objects that met his eye. He could take an inventory of the contents of a house from cellar to attic merely by surveying them, and could afterward write it 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 minutest topographical detail; such as pumps, trees, bow-windows And posts, all correctly marked. 6onspi<uous in instances of this mechanical kind of memory are to be found among the famous mental calculators. Jefedhh Bux-. ton was a celebrity of this kind about the middle of the las- century. He had but little education, and indeed was not able to write his own name, I But in arithmetic and in abstruse cafculations his ]powers were wonderfuj. Tie following is a specimen of the probleps which when put to test, he solved mtntally in

a few minutes: Find how many cubical eighths of an inch there are in a quadrangular mass measuring 13,145,789 yards long, 2,642,832 yards wide and 54,965 yards thick When in London in 1754 he was taken to see Garrick as ‘Richard 111. at Drury Lane. The play did not interest him, but he occupied himself in reckoning the nuihber of words he heard and in counting the number of steps made by the dancers. JJie American boy, Zerah Colburn, who came to Lonidon in 1812, was a similar phenomenon. He had noknofledge 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 implysn unwholesome development of one of the brain at the expense of the rest. The retentiveness oi such a ory as Lord Macaulay’s is greatly Ao Be preferred to the abnormal mental activity of an animated calculating machine.