little use, for the most important articles of our knowledge might have remained latent in our minds even when those occasions presented themselves to which they are immediately applicable. Dr. George Moore, in his treatise on the power of the soul over the body, a book well worthy of perusal, takes a spiritual view of the memory; he says the operation of the soul upon the body and the incorporeal origin and end of mind will be further rendered manifest by meditating upon another endowment, namely, memory. This indeed is presupposed in the idea of abstraction, since we cannot contemplate or reflect unless the mind be previously furnished with objects or the remembered images of past impressions. We may dwell the rather on this faculty as it is essential to the exercise of thought and must precede reasoning. Hesiod said the nine Muses are the daughters of Mnemosyne, and rightly did he thus determine, since without memory they never could have existed, for every production of human intellect has its origin in this faculty, hence the mind of the rational being is first exercised in examining objects and enjoying sensations, since the remembrance of these constitutes the ground work of reflection and orethought. The infant's reason requires for development only familiarity with facts and the opportunity of comparing them with each other. Thus it happens that savage tribes and persons wholly without education exhibit so many of the characteristics of childhood, because their minds remain without sufficient acquaintance with facts fully to call forth their reason; "the order of learning is from the senses to the imagination, and from this to the intellect." It is not our purpose to investigate this faculty of Memory in philosophical order, but to relate certain facts in connection with its exercise which may assist us in deducing certain inferences concerning the independence and management of the thinking principle. Attention and association are generally deemed essential to the memory, but experience certainly proves that its extent or capacity do not entirely depend on what is commonly understood by attention and association; at least we find in many instances that we cannot detect the association, nor does it often appear that facility of recollection is in proportion to the effort to attend or to 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 individual who was a most annoying stammerer, became so excessively 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 reappeared 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 all 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 instances 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 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 operations, 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, dictated 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 Athenæus on cups, or of Eustathius on Homer, bring to bear at once. 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 apprehension, but the speeches he listened to were only retained, until he had written them. Space forbids us to enter largely upon the question of defective or diseased memory, but as the assertion has been made that nothing once learnt is ever really lost, it may be well to mention one or two cases which bear out this view. Sir Astley Cooper relates a case of a sailor who was received into St. Thomas's Hospital, in a state of stupor which had continued some months from an injury to the head; after an operation he recovered speech, but no one in the hospital could understand his language; however a Welch milkwoman who happened to come into the ward answered him, for he spoke Welch, which was his native language; he had been absent from Wales more than thirty years, and prior to the accident had apparently forgotten Welch, although he now spoke it fluently, and could not recollect a word of any other tongue; on his perfect recovery he regained his English, and lost his Welch, or rather it was again buried. Dr. Abercrombie relates the case of a child four years old, who was trepanned while in a state of profound stupor from fracture of the skull; after recovery the child retained no recollection of the accident or the operation, yet at the age of fifteen, during the delirium of fever, he gave his mother an accurate description of the operation, and the persons present, their dress, and other minute particulars. These cases might be multiplied, but they are sufficient for the purpose, and we now pass on to offer a few remarks on the temporary failure of memory which occurs in many ways. Sometimes it is general and extends to every subject, but usually it is manifest on some subjects more than others. Salmuth mentions a case in which a person forgot to pronounce words but could nevertheless write them. The celebrated surgeon, John Hunter, was suddenly attacked with a singular failure of memory; while visiting at a friend's house he forgot what part of the house he was in, and did not know the name of the street when told it, nor where his own house was; he had no conception of anything existing beyond the room he was in, though perfectly conscious of the loss of his memory; he was also quite alive to impression upon the senses, and looked out of the window, though it was rather dark at the time, to see if he could become sensible of the situation of the house. The loss of memory gradually went off, and in less than half an hour he perfectly recovered; it is probable that this might have been connected with a gouty habit, although he was not then labouring under a paroxysm; bearing in mind the above case, we can credit the story told in the Physiological Magazine, of a German who called upon a friend, and being asked to send up his name, forgot it, and not having a card, said, "Pray tell me who I am, for I cannot recollect," a situation which was decidedly serio comic. In conclusion let us take care that things committed to memory are worthy of being remembered, never forgetting that although a strong absorbing passion or sentiment may for a time appear to blot out everything else, we cannot forget what we have once learnt; we are unable to perform the achievement which the immortal Shakespere undertook to perform in the person of Hamlet, whom he thus makes speak, when acquainted with the murder of his father, Yea from the table of my memory, I'll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pleasures past, But as this cannot be, as no human being while the mind is sane has the power to prevent the reproduction of ideas which it has once entertained, let us learn to live that memory may be a sweet solace to us, and that when we near the end the representation of the past may have no terrors for us. COMMERCIAL ASPECT OF JERUSALEM. THE following Moore's report, on the Trade and HE following interesting particulars, are extracted Commerce of Jerusalem, for the year 1866. "Trade and Commerce.-The trade of the Sandjak (or minor province) of Jerusalem is very inconsiderable. Jerusalem, the chief town, is one of the least commercial or in dustrial of cities. The principal imports from England are cotton goods and some colonials. Of the former it is calculated that between 300 and 400 bales, of the value of 16,000l. to 20,000l., annually find their way here. There are no British merchants or tradesmen. The imports from foreign countries-consisting chiefly of woollen manufactures, hardware, glass, and fancy goods-are on an equally limited |