598 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



edly is, would surely never suffice for the almost infinite variety of 

 perceptions and facts with which our memory alone (not to mention 

 any other mental faculty) is so abundantly stored. Suppose, for exam- 

 ple, we take merely the human beings, living or extinct, with whose 

 names or personalities we are more or less fully acquainted, and try 

 to give a cell or a fiber or a ganglion to each ; how many cells or fibers 

 of ganglia would be left unappropriated at the end of the enumeration 

 for all the rest of animate or inanimate nature, and all the other facts 

 or sensations with which we are perfectly familiar, to say nothing of 

 emotions, volitions, pleasures, pains, and all the other minor elements 

 of our complex being ! Let us begin, by way of experiment, with 

 Greek history alone, and try to distribute one separate nerve-element 

 apiece to Solon and Periander, to Themistocles and Aristides, to Herod- 

 otus and Thucydides, to Zeuxis and Pheidias, to Socrates and Plato, 

 to ^schylus and Soi^hocles, to Aristides and Alexander, and so on 

 straight through down to the very days of the Byzantine Empire. 

 Then let us begin afresh over again, and give a cell all round to the 

 noble Romans of our happy school-days, Romulus and Remus (myth 

 or reality matters little for our present purpose), the seven kings and 

 the ten decemvirs, the Curtius who leaped into the gulf and the Sca}- 

 vola who burned his hand off in the Etruscan fire, those terrible Scipios 

 and those grim Gracchi, our enemy Horace with his friend Maecenas, 

 and so down through all the Caesars to the second Romulus again, 

 pretty much where we originally started. Once more, apply the same 

 thing to English history, and allot a single brain-element apiece to every- 

 body we can remember from Cerdic of Wessex to Queen Victoria, from 

 Csedmon the poet, through Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope, 

 to Tennyson, Swinburne, and Oscar Wilde — a cell each for all the 

 statesmen, priests, fighters, writers, thinkers, doers, and miscellaneous 

 nobodies whom we can possibly recall from the limbo of f orgetf ulness, 

 from the days when Ilengist and Ilorsa (alas ! more myths) drove their 

 symmetrical three keels ashore at Ebbsfleet, to the events recorded for 

 our present edification in this evening's newspaper. (And observe in 

 passing that, out of deference to advanced Teutonic scholarship, I have 

 simply flung away Caractacus and Boadicea, Carausias and Allectus, 

 and all the other vague and vaguely-remembered personalities of the 

 earlier British and Romano-British history.) Why, by the time we 

 had got through our historic personages alone, we should have but a 

 very scanty remnant of places for the thousands and thousands of liv- 

 ing individuals with whom each one of us must have come in contact, 

 and each of whom seems to occupy a separate niche or distinct pigeon- 

 hole in the endless archives of the particular memory. 



And this is only a single small department of the possibly memo- 

 rable, a mere specimen category out of an innumerable collection that 

 might equally well have been adduced in evidence. Take the animal 

 world, for example — the creatures themselves, and not their names — 



