On Memory. 501 
retain, but rather to the suitability of the subject to the 
mental character and habit of the individual. A gentleman 
engaged in a banking establishment made an error in his 
accounts, and after an interval of several months spent 
days and nights in vain endeavours to discover where the 
mistake lay; at length worn out by fatigue he went to bed, 
and in a dream recollected all the circumstances that gave 
rise to the error. He remembered that on a certain day 
several persons were waiting in the bank, when one indi- 
vidual who was a most annoying stammerer, became so ex- 
cessively noisy and impatient, that to get rid of him his 
money was paid before his turn, and the entry of this sum 
was neglected, and thus arose the deficiency in the account. 
In this case memory produced the dream without any 
suggestive association, for the circumstances which re- 
appeared were not consciously connected with the error in 
the mind of the dreamer. The soul undisturbed by the 
senses reviewed the past, and recognised what it desired to 
learn, the fact it was in search of. 
Upon the whole we may safely conclude that although 
the faculty of memory is the power which individualises 
man, and seems to be the concentration of ali he has ever 
seen, heard, read, spoken, or thought of, the principles upon 
which that faculty depends are still involved in difficulty 
and considerable obscurity, and present a wide and perhaps 
a fertile field for laborious and scientific inquiry. And it 
is much to be desired that medical men should carefully 
note and publish the effects produced upon the memory by 
disease and age, with which their observations from time 
to time makes them acquainted. 
We will now proceed to notice a few remarkable instan- 
ces of strong capacious and retentive memory preserved by 
ancient and modern writers. Pliny in his natural history, 
book seventh, chap. twenty-fourth, states that King Cyrus 
could call every soldier in his army by name, and L. Scipio 
could recollect the names of all the citizens of Rome. 
Cyneas, ambassador to Rome from King Pyrrhus, the day 
after he came to Rome, knew and saluted by name the 
senate and all the gentlemen and knights in the city. 
Mithridates, reigned over twenty-four nations of divers 
languages, and gave laws and ministered justice to them, 
and when he made a speech on public affairs spoke fluently 
in the language of the different countries without the aid of 
an interpreter. 
Carneades, a philosopher of Cyrene in Africa, who was 
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