edly is, would surely never suffice for the almost infinite variety of perceptions and facts with which our memory alone (not to mention any other mental faculty) is so abundantly stored. Suppose, for example, we take merely the human beings, living or extinct, with whose names or personalities we are more or less fully acquainted, and try to give a cell or a fiber or a ganglion to each; how many cells or fibers of ganglia would be left unappropriated at the end of the enumeration for all the rest of animate or inanimate nature, and all the other facts or sensations with which we are perfectly familiar, to say nothing of emotions, volitions, pleasures, pains, and all the other minor elements of our complex being! Let us begin, by way of experiment, with Greek history alone, and try to distribute one separate nerve-element apiece to Solon and Periander, to Themistocles and Aristides, to Herodotus and Thucydides, to Zeuxis and Pheidias, to Socrates and Plato, to Æschylus and Sophocles, to Aristides and Alexander, and so on straight through down to the very days of the Byzantine Empire. Then let us begin afresh over again, and give a cell all round to the noble Romans of our happy school-days, Romulus and Remus (myth or reality matters little for our present purpose), the seven kings and the ten decemvirs, the Curtius who leaped into the gulf and the Scævola who burned his hand off in the Etruscan fire, those terrible Scipios and those grim Gracchi, our enemy Horace with his friend Mæcenas, and so down through all the Cæsars to the second Romulus again, pretty much where we originally started. Once more, apply the same thing to English history, and allot a single brain-element apiece to everybody we can remember from Cerdic of Wessex to Queen Victoria, from Cædmon the poet, through Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope, to Tennyson, Swinburne, and Oscar Wilde—a cell each for all the statesmen, priests, fighters, writers, thinkers, doers, and miscellaneous nobodies whom we can possibly recall from the limbo of forgetfulness, from the days when Hengist and Horsa (alas! more myths) drove their symmetrical three keels ashore at Ebbsfleet, to the events recorded for our present edification in this evening's newspaper. (And observe in passing that, out of deference to advanced Teutonic scholarship, I have simply flung away Caractacus and Boadicea, Carausias and Allectus, and all the other vague and vaguely-remembered personalities of the earlier British and Romano-British history.) Why, by the time we had got through our historic personages alone, we should have but a very scanty remnant of places for the thousands and thousands of living individuals with whom each one of us must have come in contact, and each of whom seems to occupy a separate niche or distinct pigeonhole in the endless archives of the particular memory.
And this is only a single small department of the possibly memorable, a mere specimen category out of an innumerable collection that might equally well have been adduced in evidence. Take the animal world, for example—the creatures themselves, and not their names—
