I have the
strongest evidence of its hereditary character after allowing, and
over-allowing, for all conceivable influences of education and
family tradition.

Last of all, I took advantage of the opportunity afforded by a
meeting of the Anthropological Institute to read a memoir there on
the subject, and to bring with me many gentlemen well known in the
scientific world, who have this habit of seeing numerals in Forms,
and whose diagrams were suspended on the walls. Amongst them are
Mr. G. Bidder, Q.C., the Rev. Mr. G. Henslow, the botanist;
Prof. Schuster, F.R.S., the physicist; Mr. Roget, Mr. Woodd Smith,
and Colonel Yule, C.B., the geographer. These diagrams are given
in Plate I. Figs. 20-24. I wished that some of my foreign
correspondents could also have been present, such as M. Antoine
d'Abbadie, the well-known French traveller and Membre de l'Institut,
and Baron v. Osten Sacken, the Russian diplomatist and entomologist,
for they had given and procured me much information.

I feel sure that I have now said enough to remove doubts as to the
authenticity of my data. Their trustworthiness will, I trust, be
still more apparent as I proceed; it has been abundantly manifest to
myself from the internal evidences in a large mass of correspondence,
to which I can unfortunately do no adequate justice in a brief memoir.
It remains to treat the data in the same way as any other scientific
facts and to extract as much meaning from them as possible.

The peculiarity in question is found, speaking very roughly, in about
1 out of every 30 adult males or 15 females. It consists in the
sudden and automatic appearance of a vivid and invariable "Form" in
the mental field of view, whenever a numeral is thought of, in which
each numeral has its own definite place. This Form may consist of a
mere line of any shape, of a peculiarly arranged row or rows of
figures, or of a shaded space.

I give woodcuts of representative specimens of these Forms, and very
brief descriptions of them extracted from the letters of my
correspondents. Sixty-three other diagrams on a smaller scale will
be found in Plates I., II. and III., and two more which are coloured
are given in Plate IV.

[Illustration: ]

D.A. "From the very first I have seen numerals up to nearly 200,
range themselves always in a particular manner, and in thinking of a
number it always takes its place in the figure. The more attention I
give to the properties of numbers and the