wan after an evening of dissipation; but my languor and the over-strung state of brain which will make the next two days mere endurance of life, come not from pleasure, but from public speaking. I can only get rid of my exhaustion by getting rid of my duty. To-day it is rather worse than usual, because I was obliged to give an hour last night, and on every Sunday until confirmation, to prepare some young men who cannot come on any other evening. After that I drank tea with the V- -s, and found them all suffering more or less from the effects of this sand-impregnated wind. I was too tired to talk. I am going to take a solitary walk on the downs, untempting as the day and atmosphere are, to try to invigorate after yesterday, and to get up resolution for a speech at a meeting this evening, in which I take the chair.

CXXXII.

Prefatory Observations to M. Zaba's Lecture on Polish

Mnemonics.

Memory depends on two circumstances-attention and the laws of association.

I. Attention.

Doubtless we are born with different natural capacities of memory. I leave this to the physiologist to explain, to show why, with an equal volume of brain, one man may have judgment and another memory; why in certain states of health we can remember better than in others.

It is unquestionable, however, that memory can be improved; and it will generally, I believe, be found that this improvement arises from increased power of fixing the attention. No one can hope to remember who has not acquired the power of concentrating his attention.

A proof that this is one of the conditions of recollecting, we have in the fact that we recollect circumstances witnessed and things learnt in childhood, whereas we forget the events of yesterday; and this because when we come into the world all is new, startling, and arrests the attention. In later life we see as

All is dulled; we

if we saw not, and hear as if we heard not.
are familiar with all, and our attention is languid and flags.

Another proof lies in the fact that people remember chiefly those points in which their profession or circumstances most interest them. For instance, one of the witnesses in the case of Rush, the murderer, deposed that the murderer wore a mask, or visor, made of linen or some soft material. On being crossexamined and asked how she could swear that it was not of paper, as the event occurred in a darkened house, she replied that she had observed of the mask that it did not rustle. There spoke the woman's memory dependent on feminine observation. No man would have remarked the material of the mask. It was the woman's province.

Another illustration occurs in the history of Jedediah Buxton, the ploughman, of wonderful arithmetical capacities. You might have given him the size of the circumference of a wheel, and he would have told you on the spot how many circumvolutions it would make in going round the globe. This was his only forte. In almost all other points he was deficient. As usual in England, they lionised the wonderful ploughman. Among other places, they took him to the Opera. Upon inquiring what he thought of the celebrated dancer, he replied, 'Wonderful! she danced

steps in so many minutes!' That was all that he had attended to; that was all that he remembered. The gracefulness, the attitudes, the science, were all thrown away on him, and would be soon forgotten. Only in his own particular department of numbers, where his attention was stimulated by habit, did he see or remember anything.

II. Memory, again, depends upon the laws of association. What we mean by association is easily explained. When two things have been remarked together, in connection, it is a law of the mind that the presentation of the one at any future time will suggest the other. Thus, if an accident has occurred at a certain turning of a road to me, I shall never be able to pass that spot without the spontaneous reappearance in my memory of the accident; or, if my friend has been in the habit of using a

particular cane, the sight of the cane will conjure up a vivid recollection of my friend.

A great anatomist of the mind1 has told us that the conditions of mental association are principally three—

I. That of analogy.

2. That of contrast.

3. That of juxtaposition.

Juxtaposition, or contiguity. As, for instance, if you were in the habit for six weeks consecutively of seeing two men walk arm in arm, the sight of the one would force you to think instantaneously of the other.

And this is the kind of association on which verbal memory depends. Words that have been in connection suggest each other. One sentence brings up the sentence that has been read before in contiguity with it. It is not the highest memory, but a very useful one.

Contrast-as when smallness suggests the thought of greatness, or a mean action compels you to the thought of nobleness.

The highest of all, is that memory which suggests by analogy. It is this habit which furnishes the orator with illustrations and parallels. It is this which essentially characterises the inventor and creator; as when the bole of a spreading oak suggested itself to Smeaton, the architect of the Eddystone Lighthouse, when he desired to build an edifice which should brave the storm. And it is this which makes the great historian. Let me illustrate it from the life of Dr. Arnold. When Dr. Hampden was, as it seemed to him, persecuted for his opinions, the zeal with which he espoused his cause was not merely the result of affection for his friend, or love of his views. To Arnold it recalled the innumerable parallels of the past. He saw in Hampden's judges a resurrection of the spirit which had presided in many a council like that of Constance. All the past persecution of opinion rose like a phantom before his mind's eye. Thus does the historian write the present and the past, by the analogy of principles; yet between the name of Huss and

1 Aristotle.

Hampden how little resemblance! the two men how wide a difference!

Between the opinions of

These are the internal laws of memory-universal laws; the laws of suggestion.

Now, M. Zaba has invented a plan by which he proposes to assist memory by its own laws: a species of memoria technica, or artificial memory.

Its principles, as far as I collected from a hasty sketch he gave me, are twofold :—

1. It relies upon the additional aid furnished to mental memory by the eye. The importance of this aid all know who have studied history with or without a map. In the latter case memory will simply depend on the association of juxtaposition. Events and words followed one another in a certain order. If your verbal or your contiguous memory be tenacious, you may retain the circumstances; but if not, all you recollect will be confused. But if you call in the aid of eyesight, localising this battle there, and tracing that invasion from town to town, you have got a local habitation as well as a name for your facts— the map is transferred to the inward eye.

Or you might skim over unobservantly the account of the locality of the birth of the first Prince of Wales; but if you had stood in the chamber in Carnarvon Castle where the event took place, it would be engraven there for life; or, if you had seen the axe or block in the Tower on which some historical personage suffered, how much more vivid would your recollection of his fate become !

It is a passage often quoted from an ancient poet, that objects presented to the eye stimulate the attention and the mind far more keenly than those which are merely offered to the ear or the intellect.

M. Zaba's system maps out, as you see, all the past, localising every event; and so you have in its proper shelf, or pigeon-hole, all that you would remember.

2. The next principle which he has summoned to his aid is that of method.

Now, without method memory is useless.

Detached facts

are practically valueless. All public speakers know the value of method. Persons not accustomed to it imagine that a speech is learnt by heart. Knowing a little about the matter, I will venture to say that if any one attempted that plan, either he must have a marvellous memory, or else he would break down three times out of five. It simply depends upon correct arrangement. The words and sentences are left to the moment; the thoughts methodised beforehand : and the words, if the thoughts are rightly arranged, will place themselves.

But upon the truthfulness of the arrangement all depends. Sometimes a man will find that his divisions have been artificial, and not natural. A thought is put down under a certain head, but there is no reason why it had not been in an earlier division. It belongs to both—a sure proof that the division has been false and confused. Then, in speaking, perhaps it suggests itself under the first head; and when he comes to the one where it was to have been, there is a gap, and he stumbles and blunders.

Artificial arrangement must rest on a real and natural basis, or else it will be only partially useful. Dr. Whewell, in his pamphlet which forms one of a series delivered, at the suggestion of Prince Albert, on the different departments of the Great Exhibition-shows in a very interesting way how real and natural the arrangement of the Exhibition was; how perfectly successful in consequence; and how they gradually fell into the natural arrangement, after former Exhibitions had step by step corrected the mistakes of a more arbitrary and artificial division.

Now, the practicability and value of M. Zaba's scheme will mainly depend upon the question whether his method is simply artificial, or whether the arbitrary division rests upon the natural reason. For instance, each year is divided into nine compartments-one representing a sovereign; a second, revolution; a third, invention, and so on. I invite him to explain this. Nine is an artificial number. Do nine particulars exhaust the chief subjects that are memorable? Do they interfere with each other? &c. &c.