660 PSYCHOLOGY. 



under a seal — no impression, however disconnected with 

 others, is wiped out. Others, like a jelly, vibrate to every 

 touch, but under usual conditions retain no permanent 

 mark. These latter minds, before they can recollect a fact, 

 must weave it into their permanent stores of knowledge. 

 They have no desultory memory-. Those persons, on the 

 contrary, who retain names, dates and addresses, anecdotes, 

 gossip, poetry, quotations, and all sorts of miscellaneous 

 facts, without an eflbrt, have desultory memory in a high 

 degree, and certaiuly owe it to the unusual tenacity of their 

 brain-substance for any path once formed therein. Xo 

 one probably was ever effective on a voluminous scale with- 

 out a high degree of this physiological retentiveness. In 

 the practical as in the theoretic life, the man whose acquisi- 

 tions stick is the man who is always achieving and advancing, 

 whilst his neighbors, spending most of their time in relearn- 

 ing what they once knew but have forgotten, simply hold 

 their oavu. A Charlemagne, a Luther, a Leibnitz, a Walter 

 Scott, any example, in short, of your quarto or folio editions 

 of mankind, must needs have amazing retentiveness of the 

 purely physiological sort. Men without this retentiveness 

 may excel in the quality of their work at this point or at 

 that, but will never do such mighty sums of it, or be infla- 

 ential contemporaneously on such a scale." 



* ISot that mei'e native tenacity will make a man great. It must be 

 coupled with great passions and great intellect besides. Imbeciles some- 

 limes have extraordinary desultory memory. Drobisch describes (Empi- 

 rische Psychol., p. 95) the case of a }"Oung man whom he examined. He 

 had with difficulty been taught to read and speak. "But if two or three 

 minutes were allovred him to peruse an octavo page, he then could spell 

 the single words out from his memory as well as if the book lay open 

 before him. . . . That there was no deception I could test by means of a 

 new Latin law-dissertatiou which had just come into my hands, which he 

 never could have seen, and of which both subject and language were 

 unknown to him. He read oflE [mentally] man}'' lines, skipping about too, 

 of the page which had been given him to see, no woise than if the experi- 

 ment Had been made with a child's story." Drobisch describes this case 

 as if it were one of unusual persistence in the visual image ['primary 

 memory,' cide supra, p. 643]. But he adds that the youth 'remembered 

 his pages a long time.' In the Journal of Speculative Pliilosophy for Jan. 

 1871 (VI. 6) is an account by Mr. W. D. Henkle (together with the stock 

 classic examples of preternatural memory) of an almost blind Pennsylvania 

 farmer who could remember the day of the week on which any date had 



