Page:Memory; how to develop, train, and use it - Atkinson - 1919.djvu/38

32 ginning with the last word and ending with the first. Lyon, the English actor, is said to have duplicated this feat, using a large London paper and including the market quotations, reports of the debates in Parliament, the railroad time-tables and the advertisements. A London waiter is said to have performed a similar feat, on a wager, he memorizing and correctly repeating the contents of an eight-page paper. One of the most remarkable instances of extraordinary memory known to history is that of the child Christian Meinecken. When less than four years of age he could repeat the entire Bible; two hundred hymns; five thousand Latin words; and much ecclesiastical history, theory, dogmas, arguments; and an encyclopædic quantity of theological literature. He is said to have practically retained every word that was read to him. His case was abnormal, and he died at an early age.

John Stuart Mill is said to have acquired a fair knowledge of Greek, at the age of three years, and to have memorized Hume, Gibbon, and other historians, at the age of eight.