A FEAT OF MEMORY.

Globe, Volume XXII, Issue 1985, 5 July 1880, Page 3

A FEAT OF MEMORY.

A correspondent in America writes to "Nature" as follows :—"The following feat of memory seems to be worthy of record in your pages. It is new to the writer, though by no means uncommon over here. Like the country itself, many institutions in the United States run to size in a way apt to astonish the dwellers in our ' tight little island.' So it is with hotels. Thus, at some of them many hundreds of persons are simultaneously dining in one room. At the entrance the hats, &0., of the guests are deposited with a person in attendance to receive them. He does not check or arrange them in any particular order, and he invariably restores them each to the right owner, as they emerge from tbe dining-room. The difficulty of tho feat naturally depends on the number of hats in charge at the same time. Tho most remarkable case whioh has come under the notice of tho writer is at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, New York. There the attendant, who is on duty several hours a day, has sometimes as many as 500 hats in.his possession at one time. A majority of them belong to people whom he has never seen before, and there is a constant flux of persons in and out. Yet even a momentary hesitation in selecting tho right hat rarely occurs. The performer at the above hotel says that he forma a mental picture of the owner's face inside the hat, and that on looking at any hat the wearer's face is instantly brought before his mind's eye. It would be interesting to test how far this power is possessed by an avarage unpraotised person when put in the right way of doing it. While many of our ordinary recollections are not visual, at least not consciously so, it appears probable that most cases of extraordinary memory consist in an unusual power of making and retaining visualized impressions."