course, cannot be communicated. We invite to watch to try them, to analyze and anatomize them, before we come to believe in their sincerity: we will often find that their superiority consists simply in the knowledge they have of some contrivance, which might be, but which they do not wish to see, communicated to others.
Simonides, a lyric poet, who died 503 B. C., is related to have discovered the Art of Memory by chance. The principal expedient and foundation of his contrivances were derived from the association and localization of ideas. Next, we find that Aristotle, who died 322 B. C., has written a work entitled Mnemonicon, which has been lost. Cicero relates circumstantially and comments upon Simonides' Art (de Orat., lib. ii.): Pliny (Hist. Nat., lib. vii., cap. 24,) expressly names Metrodorus, a contemporary of Cicero, as the individual who first brought the art into a scientic form.
The usefulness of the art, as it can be acquired from the study of these fragments of antiquity, although often underrated and not propagated with sufficient energy, has never been denied; but let us see what was the degree of knowledge of those who most likely knew the whole of the ancient mnemonic art.
Aristotle's Mnemonicon is lost, but we know that it has existed; and we know, also, that the author of it, who surely has made use of his own levers, was an Aristotle; and we ask, Where is the man whose brain has embraced and retained such an ocean of notions as did Aristotle? Some of these may have been wrong; but the strength, the boldness, the originality, and, above all, the stupendous bulk of that man's knowledge, stand hitherto unequalled.
The pupil of Aristotle, for whom, surely, the
