hand and "seize the weapons as they went smoking by." Ben Jonson could
repeat all he had written. Scaliger memorized the Iliad in three weeks.
Locke says: "Without memory, man is a perpetual infant." Quintilian and
Aristotle regarded it as a measure of genius.

Now all this is very good. We all agree that a reliable memory is an
invaluable possession for the speaker. We never dissent for a moment
when we are solemnly told that his memory should be a storehouse from
which at pleasure he can draw facts, fancies, and illustrations. But can
the memory be trained to act as the warder for all the truths that we
have gained from thinking, reading, and experience? And if so, how? Let
us see.

Twenty years ago a poor immigrant boy, employed as a dish washer in New
York, wandered into the Cooper Union and began to read a copy of Henry
George's "Progress and Poverty." His passion for knowledge was awakened,
and he became a habitual reader. But he found that he was not able to
remember what he read, so he began to train his naturally poor memory
until he became the world's greatest memory expert. This man was the
late Mr. Felix Berol. Mr. Berol could tell the population of any town in
the world, of more than five thousand inhabitants. He could recall the
names of forty strangers who had just been introduced to him and was
able to tell which had been presented third, eighth, seventeenth, or in
any order. He knew the date of every important event in history, and
could not only recall an endless array of facts but could correlate them
perfectly.

To what extent Mr. Berol's remarkable memory was natural and required
only attention, for its development, seems impossible to determine with
exactness, but the evidence clearly indicates that, however useless were
many of his memory feats, a highly retentive memory was developed where
before only "a good forgettery" existed.

The freak memory is not worth striving for, but a good working memory
decidedly is. Your power as a speaker will depend to a large extent upon
your ability to retain impressions and call them forth when occasion
demands, and that sort of memory is like muscle--it responds to
training.

_What Not to Do_

It is sheer misdirected effort to begin to memorize by learning words by
rote, for that is beginning to build a pyramid at the apex. For years
our schools were cursed by this vicious system--vicious not only because
it is inefficient but for the more important