502 On Memory. 
sent on an embassy to Rome, A.C. 155, with Diogenes, the 
stoic, and Critolaus, the peripatetic, could repeat from 
memory when required, any volume in the libraries, as 
readily as if he were reading. 
Dr. John Wallis, who held the Savilian professorship of 
Geometry at Oxford, tells us that without the assistance 
of pen and ink, or any equivalent, he was able in the dark, 
by mere force of memory, to perform arithmetical opera- 
tions, such as multiplication, division, extraction of roots, 
&c. to 40 places. In one particular instance, at the request 
of a foreigner, he proposed to himself when he had retired 
to rest, a number of 53 places, and found its square root to 
27, places, and without even writing down the number, dic- 
tated it from memory twenty days after; an exercise of 
memory which seems fully equal to anything which was 
accomplished in the way of calculation by the American 
boy Bidder, who surprised every one by his arithmetical 
powers. | 
Of the celebrated Porson, of Cambridge, it may be 
said that recollection was the habit of his mind, his life 
was a mixed commentary on profane and sacred learning, 
and his genius was like a phosphorescence on the graves 
of the dead; it is said that nothing came amiss to his 
memory, he could set a child right in his twopenny 
fable book, repeat all the moral tales of the Dean 
of Badajos, render a page of Athenzeus on cups, or 
of Eustathius on Homer, bring to bear at once on 
any question every passage from the whole range of 
Greek literature, to elucidate it, and approximate on the 
instant the slightest coincidence even in thought or 
expression. A late learned friend, Hugh Stewart Boyd, 
whose elegant translations from the Greek Fathers are 
well known, and who did good service to the sacred 
cause of Christian truth by his essay on the Greek Article, 
written expressly for Dr. Adam Clark’s annotations on the 
Bible, told us that he could repeat 2,000 lines from various 
Greek authors, an effort of memory to which we believe few 
living scholars are equal. The memory of Newton was 
wonderfully retentive. Blaise Pascal, the French divine 
and mathematician, is said never to have forgotten, until his 
health failed, anything he had ever done, read, or thought 
of; and Woodfall, the celebrated parliamentry reporter, was 
an instance of great quickness of memory and of apprehen- 
sion, but the speeches he listened to were only retained, 
until he had written them. Space forbids us to enter largely 
