FEATS OF MEMORY.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXVI, Issue 1261, 20 June 1914, Page 4

FEATS OF MEMORY.

ABNORMAL MIND DEVELOPMENT. Lecturing to the Sociological Society on the relation of :,enius to insanity. Dr R. ArmsuongJones, chief medical officer at Claybury Asylum, said recently that in acute insanity, as in genius, the perceptions were quicker and the associations keener. Insanity was known to occur with unusual frequency among the relations of men of genius. Life, however, was a matter of compensation and equilibrium, and if great development occurred in one direction there was a compensating defect in others. He knew a man who could recite “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’’ from cover to cover, yet his mind continued to be of the nursery type, and he did not understand what he dramatically recited. Another man he knew would play upon the organ any music he bad previously beard, and this without note —of which he knew nothing—to remind him. Another person visited the Great Eastern steamship, and afterwards constructed from memory an accurate model of it, yet he possessed only the mind of an inordinately vain and egotistical child.