ies. Mrs. Somerville records the
case of an idiot who could repeat a whole sermon _verbatim_, after once
hearing it, but who was stupid and ignorant as to every thing else. And
there are many instances in the books to the same effect.

Another kind of memory may be called, for want of a better name, the
local memory. A person who has this strongly developed, if he once goes
to a place, whether a room, or a street in a city, or a road in any part
of the country, knows the way again, and can find it by instinct ever
after. In the same way any one gifted with this almost unerring sense of
locality, can find any book on any shelf in any part of a library where
he has once been. He knows, in like manner, on which side of the page he
saw any given passage in a book, which impressed him at the time,
although he may never have had the volume in his hand more than once. He
may not remember the number of the page, but he is sure of his
recollection that it was the left or the right hand one, as the case may
be, and this knowledge will abridge his labor and time in finding it
again by just one half. This local memory is invaluable to a librarian or
an assistant in shortening the labor of finding things. If you have a
good local memory, you can, in no long time, come to dispense with the
catalogue and its shelf-marks or classification marks, almost entirely,
in finding your books. Although this special gift of memory--the sense of
locality--is unquestionably a lower faculty of the mind than some others
named, and although there are illiterate persons who can readily find and
produce any books in a library which have often passed through their
hands, yet it is a faculty by no means to be despised. It is one of the
labor-saving, time-saving gifts, which should be welcomed by every
librarian. The time saved from searching the catalogues for
location-marks of the outside of books, will enable him to make many a
research in their inside. This faculty, of course, is indefinitely
strengthened and improved by use--and the same is true of the other
branches of the sense which we call memory. The oftener you have been to
any place, the better you know the way. The more frequently you have
found and produced a given book from its proper receptacle, the easier
and the quicker will be your finding it again.

Another faculty or phase of memory is found in the ability to call up the
impression made by any object once seen by the eye, so as to rep