270 HERMANN VON HELMIIOLTZ: 



especially with wooden blocks, filled up the rest of the 

 time. Reading came pretty early, which, of course, 

 greatly increased the range of my occupations. But a 

 defect of my mental organisation showed itself almost 

 as early, in that I had a bad memory for disconnected 

 things. The first indication of this I consider to be 

 the difficulty I had in distinguishing between left and 

 right ; afterwards, when at school I began with 

 languages, I had greater difficulties than others in 

 learning words, irregular grammatical forms, and 

 peculiar terms of expression. History as then taught 

 to us I could scarcely master. To learn prose by heart 

 was martyrdom. This defect has, of course, only in- 

 creased, and is a vexation of my mature age. 



But when I possessed small mnemotechnical me- 

 thods, or merely such as are afforded by the metre 

 and rhyme of poetry, learning by heart, and the reten- 

 tion of what I had learnt, went on better. I easily 

 remembered poems by great authors, but by no means 

 so easily the somewhat artificial verses of authors of 

 the second rank. I think that is probably due to 

 the natural flow of thought in good poems, and I am 

 inclined to think that in this connection is to be 

 found an essential basis of aesthetic beauty. In the 

 higher classes of the Gymnasium I could repeat some 

 books of the Odyssey, a considerable number of the 

 oles of Horace, and large stores of German poetry. 

 In other directions I was just in the position of our 



