of great compass and power. It appears in some minds of an almost incredible grasp. It is related of Joseph Scaliger, that he committed Homer to memory in twenty-one days; and the whole Greek poets in three months. Seneca mentions that he had been able to repeat two thousand names read to him, in the order in which they had been spoken; and that on one occasion two hundred unconnected verses having been pronounced by the different pupils of his preceptor, he repeated them in a reversed order. Muretus states that having heard that a young Corsican, who occasionally visited his house, had an extraordinary memory, he requested from him a specimen of his power; when dictating a series of words, Latin, Greek, barbarous, significant, and non-significant, disjoined and connected, until he had wearied himself and the scribe who wrote them down; the young man, fixing his gaze on the ground, stood silent for a few moments, and then began and repeated the whole series in the order in which they had been delivered, without the slightest hesitation; then commencing from the last, he recited them backwards; then again, so that he spoke the first, the third, the fifth, and so on; and in any other order that was asked without any error. He averred, moreover, that he could recite in that manner a series of thirty-six thousand words, and that they so adhered to his memory that, after a year's interval, he could recall them without difficulty.

Grotius, Pascal, Leibnitz, Sir James Mackintosh, Sir W. Hamilton himself, Macaulay, the late Joseph Addison Alexander, and many other eminent scholars have had the gift in its highest forms,-being able to commit with the utmost ease whatever they pleased, and forgetting nothing which they had learned, read, witnessed, or done.

Some writers hold it unnecessary to suppose a special faculty to account for this reproduction of the past; maintaining that the fact that the mind has been the subject of certain thoughts, conceptions, affections, and volitions, is as adequate a reason for the re-excitement of them, in the proper conditions, as the agencies were, in their peculiar conditions, that originally caused them. Their having taken place in the mind is indeed an indispensable condi tion of their reproduction as memories, but it is not the sole

or main cause of it: else why does not the remembrance arise at one time or another of all the forms of thought and affection of which the mind has been the subject? And why does it not ordinarily rise on as large a scale in one mind, in proportion to its past agency, as in another? Why is not the reproduction of the past as much to be ascribed to a special faculty, as its original excitement is?

Memory fluctuates greatly in all minds in its energy, and sometimes, in certain conditions of the body, fades almost into extinction.

"No other power betrays a greater dependence on corporeal conditions than memory. Not only in general does its vigorous or feeble activity essentially depend on the health and indisposition of the body, more especially of the nervous system; but there is manifested a connection between certain functions of memory, and certain parts of the cerebral apparatus. This connection, however, is such, as affords no countenance to any of the hypotheses framed to explain it now in vogue. For example, after certain diseases, or certain affections of the brain, some partial loss of memory takes place. Perhaps the patient loses the whole of his stock of knowledge previous to the disease; the faculty of acquiring and retaining new information remaining entire. Perhaps he loses the memory of words, and preserves that of things. Perhaps he may retain the memory of nouns, and lose that of verbs, or vice versa; nay, what is still more marvellous, though it is not an unfrequent occurrence, one language may be taken neatly out of his retention, without affecting his memory of others. By such observations, the older psychologists were led to the various physiological hypotheses by which they hoped to account for the phenomena of retention, as for example, the hypothesis of permanent material impressions on the brain, or of permanent dispositions in the nervous fibres to repeat the same oscillatory movements,-of particular organs for the different functions of memory,-of particular parts of the brain as repositories of the various classes of ideas, or even of a particular fibre, as the instrument of every several notion. But all these hypotheses betray only an ignorance of the proper object of philosophy, and of the true nature of the thinking principle. They are at best but useless. It cannot be argued that the limitations to which the retentive, or rather the reproductive faculty is subjected in its energies, in consequence of its bodily relations, prove the absolute depen

dence of memory on organization, and legitimate the explanation of this faculty by corporeal agencies; for the incompetency of this inference can be shown from the contradiction in which it stands to the general laws of mind, and which, howbeit conditioned by bodily relations, still ever preserves its self-activity and independence."-Pp. 419, 420.

An extraordinary instance of the loss of memory from illness came to our knowledge several years since. A young man on beginning to recover from a fever that had been attended with an unnatural heat in the brain, though causing no approach to delirium, found himself unable to recollect the incidents that occurred from hour to hour as the day passed. He at first thought it the result of his extreme prostration, and presumed he should recover his memory of what had taken place in proportion as he regained his strength. Instead of that, as he gradually recovered from illness, and became able to ride and walk out, and engage slightly in the employments with which he was familiar, the fact disclosed itself that his power of recollection was in a large degree annihilated. All the incidents of his early life were totally erased from his memory. All the anecdotes and narratives of striking events he had heard from the lips of his parents and others, were swept to oblivion. While he retained in the main his knowledge of English, his knowledge of Greek and Latin was absolutely extinguished. He was as unable to conjugate a verb, or decline a noun, as though he had never heard of them. The most he could recall was a vague shadowy feeling that there were such things, and that they were variations in the terminations of the words that modified in some way their meanings, or varied the attitudes or relations in which that was presented of which they were the names; but what those variations were or what the principles were on which they proceed, he could not recall the faintest trace. On opening a grammar, however, and looking through a conjugated verb, the whole recurred to his comprehension as perfectly as anterior to his illness; but faded away again almost immediately on his closing the book. He was at times unable to remember his own name, though sure of the fact that he had one. The attempt to recall it was like looking into vacancy, or endeavor

ing to distinguish objects in pitch darkness, and he was for some time obliged to make a memorandum of all his principal acts, as that he eat breakfast, or dined, that he read a chapter in the Bible, that he offered prayer, that he rode out or walked, that he made a call and saw certain persons, or wrote a note, or received a visit, in order that he might be sure of the events of the day. This gradually passed off, and his recollection of the ordinary occurrences of life became as quick and vivid nearly as before his illness; but he could never repossess himself fully of the languages he had lost; though he appropriated years to the effort. Though he studied a Greek or Latin book till he became familiar with all its aim, its narratives, its thoughts, its expressions and its words, if laid aside, a few weeks or days swept it to oblivion, and made it necessary to study it again much as though it had never been read; and his own essays and discourses, though carefully elaborated, and bespeaking a mastery of the subject of which he treated, in a few weeks so vanished from his memory, that if transcribed by another hand, and read to him as the compositions of another person, who was known to entertain much the same views, he would listen and approve, and suggest fresh confirmations of the points advanced, without recognising them as his own, or recollecting that he had ever written on the subjects.

One unexpected and highly beneficial result, however, sprang from this loss of memory. As his other powers remained in their integrity, and he devoted himself assiduously to study, his inability to recall what he had learned from books, drove him to the necessity of investigating subjects directly and independently by a scrutiny of their elements; and the issue soon was the development of a power of analysis, of seizing principles, of tracing relations, and of pursuing truths to their results, which he probably would never have reached in other circumstances, and made him a more effective thinker and reasoner, than though he had drawn his knowledge in a larger degree from books.

The effect of disease in other cases, however, is greatly to quicken the memory, as in the instance of the young woman related by Coleridge, who, in a fever that induced delirium, repeated passages of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, she had heard

read years before, though she had no knowledge of their meaning. In cases also of exposure to sudden and alarming danger, the mind is raised to a preternatural activity, and the memory in a few moments reproduces with the greatest distinctness long trains of thoughts, actions, and purposes, for which it apprehends it is about to give account, that ordinarily would not have recurred to it.

A similar quickening of the powers generally in which memory shares proportionally with the others sometimes takes place in sleep.

A young man had a cataleptic attack in consequence of which a singular effect was operated in his mental constitution. Some six minutes after falling asleep, he began to speak distinctly, and almost always of the same objects and concatenated events, so that he carried on from night to night the same history, or rather continued to play the same part. On wakening he had no reminiscence whatever of his dreaming thoughts,-a circumstance by the way which distinguishes this as rather a case of somnambulism than of common dreaming. Be this, however, as it may, he played a double part in his existence. By day he was the poor apprentice of a merchant, by night he was a married man, the father of a family, a senator, and in affluent circumstances. If during his vision, anything was said in regard to his waking state, he declared it unreal and a dream.

"Somnambulism is a phenomenon still more astonishing. In this singular state a person performs a regular series of rational actions, and those frequently of the most difficult and delicate nature, and what is still more marvellous, with a talent to which he could make no pretensions when awake. His memory and reminiscence supply him with recollections of words and things which perhaps were never at his disposal in the ordinary state. He speaks more fluently, a more refined language, and if we are to credit what the evidence on which it rests hardly allows us to disbelieve, he has not only perceptions through other channels than the common organs of sense, but the sphere of his cognitions is amplified to an extent far beyond the limits to which sensible perception is confined."-P. 458.

"In this remarkable state the various mental faculties are usually in a higher degree of power than in the natural. The patient has recollections of what he has wholly forgotten. He speaks languages of which, when awake, he remembers not a word. The imagination, the sense of propriety, and the faculty