jan 22nd
interesting anecdote from mark twain. he was rather impressed by india, i think.
apart from the performing-monkey bit (almonds?) it shows the mental feats indians have always been capable of. and not just brahmins, mind you :-)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Mi
Mark Twain: "Following The Equator"
CHAPTER II: Change of Costume - Fish, Snake, and Boomerang
Stories - Tests of Memory - A Brahmin Expert - General Grant's
Memory - A Delicately Improper Tale
When in doubt, tell the truth.
- Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.
About four days out from Victoria we plunged into hot weather,
and all the male passengers put on white linen clothes. One or
two days later we crossed the 25th parallel of north latitude,
and then, by order, the officers of the ship laid away their
blue uniforms and came out in white linen ones. All the ladies
were in white by this time. This prevalence of snowy costumes
gave the promenade deck an invitingly cool, and cheerful and
picnicky aspect.
[...]
The talk passed from the boomerang to dreams - usually a
fruitful subject, afloat or ashore - but this time the output
was poor. Then it passed to instances of extraordinary memory -
with better results. Blind Tom, the negro pianist, was spoken
of, and it was said that he could accurately play any piece of
music, howsoever long and difficult, after hearing it once; and
that six months later he could accurately play it again, without
having touched it in the interval. One of the most striking of
the stories told was furnished by a gentleman who had served on
the staff of the Viceroy of India. He read the details from his
note-book, and explained that he had written them down, right
after the consummation of the incident which they described,
because he thought that if he did not put them down in black and
white he might presently come to think he had dreamed them or
invented them.
The Viceroy was making a progress, and among the shows offered
by the Maharajah of Mysore for his entertainment was a
memory-exhibition. The Viceroy and thirty gentlemen of his suite
sat in a row, and the memory expert, a high-caste Brahmin, was
brought in and seated on the floor in front of them. He said he
knew but two languages, the English and his own, but would not
exclude any foreign tongue from the tests to be applied to his
memory. Then he laid before the assemblage his program - a
sufficiently extraordinary one. He proposed that one gentleman
should give him one word of a foreign sentence, and tell him its
place in the sentence. He was furnished with the French word
'est', and was told it was second in a sentence of three words.
The next, gentleman gave him the German word 'verloren' and said
it was the third in a sentence of four words. He asked the next
gentleman for one detail in a sum in addition; another for one
detail in a sum of subtraction; others for single details in
mathematical problems of various kinds; he got them.
Intermediates gave him single words from sentences in Greek,
Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and other languages, and
told him their places in the sentences. When at last everybody
had furnished him a single rag from a foreign sentence or a
figure from a problem, he went over the ground again, and got a
second word and a second figure and was told their places in the
sentences and the sums; and so on and so on. He went over the
ground again and again until he had collected all the parts of
the sums and all the parts of the sentences - and all in
disorder, of course, not in their proper rotation. This had
occupied two hours.
The Brahmin now sat silent and thinking, a while, then began and
repeated all the sentences, placing the words in their proper
order, and untangled the disordered arithmetical problems and
gave accurate answers to them all.
In the beginning he had asked the company to throw almonds at
him during the two hours, he to remember how many each gentleman
had thrown; but none were thrown, for the Viceroy said that the
test would be a sufficiently severe strain without adding that
burden to it.
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