MEMORY. 



selves in position to receive our gifts. In fact, the fish will 

 remember us ; and, furthermore, if we select a particular 

 hour of the day at which to feed them, they will apparently 

 bear it in mind. Although many men of great intellectual 

 capacity possess extraordinary good fact-memory ; we 

 find this faculty equally well developed among persons 

 of feeble mental grasp, and sometimes even among idiots. 

 Horses have extremely good fact-memories, and, as re- 

 marked by Dr. Le Bon, would win all the competitive 

 examinations if they were able to talk and write. On 

 the other hand, there are many men who have great 

 power of keeping in remembrance long and complicated 

 problems, but are singularly deficient in fact-memory. 



The vividness with which an event is retained in the 

 memory of man or beast depends on the intensity of the 

 impression, on repetition, or on both. Without intensity, 

 repetition has but little effect in fixing an impression on the 

 mind. For example, lessons which we have conned over, 

 perhaps, hundreds of times during our school days, are 

 often completely forgotten long before our hair turns grey ; 

 and yet some painful accident in our early childhood 

 may remain permanently vivid in our remembrance. The 

 ordinary system of horse-breaking, by which repetition 

 {without intensity) is chiefly relied upon for the formation 

 of habits of discipline, is defective ; because the nature of 

 the obedience thus obtained, is too weak to oblige the 

 animal to yield himself absolutely to its influence. The old, 

 tedious methods of gradually inducing a horse to obey the 

 rein, take months to produce an effect which at any moment 

 is liable to be nullified by disturbing circumstances of no 



