o much as glancing at them. Your special volume is
quickly found among hundreds of volumes, and your faculty of memory and
intuition has saved you perhaps a quarter of an hour of valuable time,
which, without that faculty, might have been wasted in search.

Again, another circumstance which might intervene to diminish the
frequency of application of the memory referred to, as to the physical
features or appearance of a book sought for, is where the
shelf-arrangement is alphabetical, by authors' names, or by the names of
the subjects of the books, if it is an alphabet of biographies. Here, the
surest and the quickest guide to the book is of course the alphabetical
order, in which it must necessarily be found.

This memory of the aspect of any object once looked at, is further well
illustrated in the very varied facilities for the spelling of words found
in different persons. Thus, there are people who, when they once see any
word (we will say a proper name) written or printed, can always
afterwards spell that word unerringly, no matter how uncommon it may be.
The mental retina, so to speak, receives so clear and exact an impression
of the form of that word from the eye, that it retains and reproduces it
at will.

But there are others, (and among them persons of much learning in some
directions) upon whom the form or orthography of a word makes little or
no impression, however frequently it meets the eye in reading. I have
known several fine scholars, and among them the head of an institution of
learning, who could not for the life of them spell correctly; and this
infirmity extended even to some of the commonest words in the language.
Why this inaptitude on the part of many, and this extraordinary facility
on the part of others, in the memorizing faculty, is a phenomenon which
may be noted down, but not solved. That vivid mental picture which is
seen by the inward eye of the person favored with a good memory, is
wholly wanting, or seen only dimly and rarely in the case of one who
easily forgets.

So vital and important is memory, that it has been justly denominated by
the German philosopher, Kant, "the most wonderful of our faculties."
Without it, the words of a book would be unintelligible to us, since it
is memory alone which furnishes us with the several meanings to be
attached to them.

Some writers on the science of mind assert that there is no such thing
with any of us as absolutely forgetting anything that ha