DISTURBANCES OF MEMORY 279 



indistinct. A study of patients afflicted with amnesia 

 seems to support this analogy. It is not possible to 

 use all the reports of such cases. I think that the 

 majority of practitioners have neither the training nor 

 the time to analyse them. I will confine myself to 

 two cases from the Clinic of Professor Rieger in 

 Wiirzburg, one of which was analysed by himself (i), 

 and the other by his assistant, Dr. Wolff (2). In the 

 first case the patient had suffered a concussion of the 

 brain in a railroad accident. Among a number of 

 other disturbances, his memory showed peculiar gaps. 

 The patient was able to recognise only the numbers 

 i, 2, and 3. The corpuscular theory of the images of 

 memory would assume that all numbers which the pa- 

 tient had originally possessed had been located each 

 in a special cell, and that these cells had all perished 

 with the exception of the cells which contained the 

 first three numbers. This at once seems strange ,and 

 becomes still stranger when taken in connection with 

 the following observation. In every case it took the 

 patient some time to find the word one when the fig- 

 ure i was held before him. The reaction-time for 

 naming a 2 was considerably longer, and for naming a 

 3 was still longer. He was able to reckon with these 

 three numbers, but when a 3 occurred he required more 

 time than when a i or a 2 occurred. The determin- 

 ation of the reaction-time furnishes the explanation of 

 the fact that all numbers beyond 3 were wanting. All 

 of Rieger's experiments on this patient showed that if 

 he did not succeed in finding the name of an object 



