43 HER OES OE INVENTION AND DISCO VER Y. 



physics, medicine, and etymology, and perfectly at home in all the 

 details of architecture, music, and law. He was well acquainted, 

 too, with most of the modern languages, and familiar with their 

 most recent literature. Nor was it at all extraordinary to hear 

 the great mechanician and engineer detailing and expounding, 

 for hours together, the metaphysical theories of the German 

 logicians, or criticising the measures or the matter of the German 

 poetry. 



" His astonishing memory was aided, no doubt, in a great 

 measure, by a still higher and rarer faculty— by his power of 

 digesting and arranging in its proper place all the information 

 he received, and of casting aside and rejecting, as it were 

 instinctively, whatever was worthless or immaterial. Every 

 conception that was suggested to his mind seemed instantly to 

 take its place among its other rich furniture, and to be 

 condensed into the smallest and most convenient form. He 

 never appeared, therefore, to be at all encumbered or perplexed 

 with the verbiage of the dull books he perused, or the idle talk 

 to which he listened; but to have at once extracted, by a kind 

 of intellectual alchemy, all that was worthy of attention, and to 

 have reduced it for his own use to its true value and to its 

 simplest form. 



And thus it often happened, that a great deal more was 

 learned from his brief and vigorous account of the theories and 

 arguments of tedious writers, than an ordinary student could 

 ever have derived from the most faithful study of the originals, 

 and that errors and absurdities became manifest from the mere 

 clearness and plainness of his statement of them, which might 

 have deluded and perplexed most of his hearers without that 

 invaluable assistance." 



