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 reason that it hurts the mind. True, some minds are

natively endowed with a wonderful facility in remembering strings of words,

facts, and figures, but such are rarely good reasoning minds; the normal person

must belabor and force the memory to acquire in this artificial way.