Fearon, on 'Mental Vigor,' tells of a man who could remember the day that every person had been buried in the parish for thirty-five years, and could repeat with unvarying accuracy the name and age of the deceased and the mourners at the funeral. But he was a complete fool. Out of the line of burials he had not one idea, could not give an intelligible reply to a single question, nor be trusted even to feed himself. While memory-development is thus apparent in some otherwise defective intellects, it has probably as often or oftener been observed to occur in connection with full or great intelligence. Edmund Burke, Clarendon, John Locke, Archbishop Tillotson, and Dr. Johnson were all distinguished for having great strength of memory. Sir W.
Hamilton observed that Grotius, Pascal, Leibnitz, and Euler were not less celebrated for their intelligence than for their memory.
Ben Jonson could repeat all that he had written and whole books he had read. Themistocles could call by name the 20,000 citizens of Athens. Cyrus is said to have known the name of every soldier in his army. Hortensius, a great Roman orator, and Seneca had also great memories. Niebuhr, the Danish historian, was remarkable for his acuteness of memory. Sir James Mackintosh, Dugald Stewart, and Dr. Gregory had similar reputations.
"Nor does great mental endowment entail physical enfeeblement;for, with temperance, literary men have reached extreme old age, as in the cases of Klopstock, Goethe, Chaucer, and the average age attained by all the signers of the American Declaration of Independence was sixty-four years, many of them being highly gifted men intellectually. Thus, in the case of the phenomenal Oscar it cannot be predicted that he will not develop, as he now promises to do, equal and extraordinary powers of mind, even though it would be rare in one of his racial descent, and in the face of the fact that precocity gives no assurance of ***** brightness, for it can be urged that John Stuart Mill read Greek when four years of age.
"The child is strumous, however, and may die young. His exhibitors, who are coining him into money, should seek the best medical care for him and avoid surcharging his memory with rubbish. Proper cultivation of his special senses, especially the tactile, by competent teachers, will give Oscar the best chance of developing intellectually and acquiring an education in the proper sense of the word."By long custom many men of letters have developed wonderful feats of memory; and among illiterate persons, by means of points of association, the power of memory has been little short of marvelous. At a large hotel in Saratoga there was at one time a negro whose duty was to take charge of the hats and coats of the guests as they entered the dining-room and return to each his hat after the meal. It was said that, without checks or the assistance of the owners, he invariably returned the right articles to the right persons on request, and no matter how large the crowd, his limit of memory never seemed to be reached. Many persons have seen expert players at draughts and chess who, blindfolded, could carry on numerous games with many competitors and win most of the matches. To realize what a wonderful feat of memory this performance is, one need only see the absolute exhaustion of one of these men after a match. In whist, some experts have been able to detail the succession of the play of the cards so many hands back that their competitors had long since forgotten it.
There is reported to be in Johnson County, Missouri, a mathematical wonder by the name of Rube Fields. At the present day he is between forty and fifty years of age, and his external appearance indicates poverty as well as indifference. His temperament is most sluggish; he rarely speaks unless spoken to, and his replies are erratic.
The boyhood of this strange character was that of an overgrown country lout with boorish manners and silly mind. He did not and would not go to school, and he asserts now that if he had done so he "would have become as big a fool as other people." A shiftless fellow, left to his own devices, he performed some wonderful feats, and among the many stories connected with this period of his life is one which describes how he actually ate up a good-sized patch of sugar cane, simply because he found it good to his taste.
Yet from this clouded, illiterate mind a wonderful mathematical gift shines. Just when he began to assert his powers is not known; but his feats have been remembered for twenty years by his neighbors. A report says:--"Give Rube Fields the distance by rail between any two points, and the dimensions of a car-wheel, and almost as soon as the statement has left your lips he will tell you the number of revolutions the wheel will make in traveling over the track. Call four or five or any number of columns of figures down a page, and when you have reached the bottom he will announce the sum. Given the number of yards or pounds of articles and the price, and at once he will return the total cost--and this he will do all day long, without apparent effort or fatigue.
"A gentleman relates an instance of Fields' knowledge of figures.
After having called several columns of figures for addition, he went back to the first column, saying that it was wrong, and repeating it, purposely miscalling the next to the last figure.
At once Fields threw up his hand, exclaiming: 'You didn't call it that way before.'
"Fields' answers come quick and sharp, seemingly by intuition.