Soon after I had left school--and when I was a freshman at college--I
made the acquaintance of a young man of about my own age who possest
a most marvelous memory, while he also showed most marvelous mental
density. He had occasion to pass examination in Euclid, as we all
of us did at the university at those times, and one would have said
that he would have been singularly successful in these examinations,
for, tho he had only read through our college Euclid once, he could
recite or write out the whole of it; or, if preferred, he could begin
at any point where one might start him and reproduce any quantity
_verbatim et literatim_--_atque punctuatim_--so far as that
was concerned. But not only was he utterly unable to understand a word
of it all, he had not even brains enough to keep his real ignorance of
Euclid to himself. He was always forgetting the good old rule _ne
quid nimis_, and as he did not know where to stop in his marvelous
recitations, the examiners naturally came to the conclusion, perfectly
justified by the facts, that he knew his Euclid by heart, but knew
nothing about geometry.--RICHARD A. PROCTOR, New York _Mail
and Express_.
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