no fewer than 22,793 verses which had been preserved by memory alone from the remotest antiquity. Even had the case been otherwise, the prodigious memories of Scott and Macaulay, well known in later years, are enough to prove such a feat as the remembrance of Ossian's entire poems by one mind possible. Among the humbler classes, too, "long" memories are by no means uncommon. If the curious will turn to the diary kept by Robert Burns during his Border tour in 1787, they will find that upon the poet's visiting Jedburgh he was taken to see a certain "Esther," who could repeat Pope's Homer from beginning to end. No one doubts now that immense powers of memory can be attained by practice. To this day, in remote Scottish kirks the members are accustomed to hear every Sunday from the pulpit one and sometimes more sermons of an hour's duration, which have been committed to memory during the previous week by the minister. To these instances should be added the fact noticed by more than one critic, that the sequence and cadence of the Gaelic verses afforded a help to the memory equalled by the compositions of no other race. There is proof, besides, that an organisation existed for the express purpose of preserving these poems. Julius Cæsar (De Bel. Gal. vi. 13) and other historians have left it on record that, for the purpose of getting their
