8 MEMOIR OF AUGUSTUS DE MORGAN. 



1822. verses, to strengthen the memory. The poor ignorant 

 jhooiboy Virgil and Homer scanners, and their subordinate Euclid 



icks 



and algebra drillers, had not the smallest idea that a 

 memory is an adjunct of each faculty, that the training of 

 one is of little or no help to another, and that the 

 memory of words, which they over-cultivated, differs 

 widely among young people. The allowance was forty 

 lines a day, Latin and Greek alternately, for five days in 

 the week, the whole two hundred to be repeated in one 

 lot on Saturday. There was as much difference between 

 the boys in the rapidity of committing to memory, as 

 between the two pilgrims who went peashod to Loretto, 

 the one with hard peas, the other with boiled, in his 

 shoes. But the boys had the sense to learn their parts, as 

 the actors do, and again, like the actors, they learnt the 

 cues. This was carried on, at a school at which I was, 

 year after year, without a single detection. Even the 

 contretemps which arose when a boy was ill on a Satur- 

 day, or when one who had been ill on a week-day came in 

 on the Saturday, were adroitly got over. I am perfectly 

 satisfied that the master, an old Fellow of Oriel, was a 

 party to the whole proceeding, as a means of reconciling 

 the appearances demanded by opinion with the amount 

 of word-catching which he thought sufficient. And judg- 

 ing by what I have heard of other schools, I suspect that 

 such connivance was not infrequent.' 



The boys of Mr. Parsons' school attended St. Michael's 

 Church, Bristol. Having heard something from Mr. De 

 Morgan of his juvenile delinquencies, arising from think- 

 ing more of mathematics than of the scarcely audible 

 sermon, I searched out the school pew during a visit to 

 Bristol, and there found, neatly marked on the oak wain- 

 scot partition, the first and second propositions of Euclid 

 and one or two simple equations, with the initials A. 

 DE M. They were made in rows of small holes, pierced 

 with the sharp point of a shoe-buckle, and are by this 

 time probably repaired and cleaned away. 



