Mr. William Ransom, in connection with the Church of England Christian Association. The lecturer, in a well thought-out and masterly manner discounted on his theme in expounding more particularly on its true and false characteristics. The Rev. T. Jones presided and at the close of the lecture, expressed a hope that the lecture which had been listened to with deep attention, would be published.
Memory and its Cultivation formed the subject of a practical lecture or seance on the evening of the 8th of December at the Castle Assembly-room, on which occasion, Mr. Stokes and his pupils entertained a large audience. In the course of his address, Mr. Stokes stated that he had delivered over 300 lectures at the Colosseum on the subject under treatment, and he was convinced that there need be no bad memory. The system which he taught was by no means complex, nor was it the mere working on the natural memory, but an artificial plan, which although worked through the natural memory, possessed peculiarities which rendered it distinct therefrom. He would engage to teach a child the multiplication table in less than half an hour. By way of example, four lads repeated from memory the counties of England and Wales, first in consecutive order, forwards and backwards, and then in any irregular form suggested by the audience by calling out the number which had been fixed to them. The same thing was done with a number of isolated words given by the audience, the same words being afterwards worked into the explanatory remarks of the lecturer entirely from memory. One of the lads also repeated some lines on temperance, whose great length and curiously rhymed terminals greatly amused and astonished the audience Suprising as this would seem, an older pupil - Mr. Wingfield - performed a greater great by giving correctly the chronology of about one hundred events connected with Hastings, the audience, with the dates before them, asking the questions in any irregular they chose. The same pupil also repeated the known distances of all the planets, a feat which Mr. Stokes believed could not be done even by the Astronomer Royal.
Having been invited to attend one of Mr. Stokes's classes, which he formed in Hastings for the cultivation of the memory, we found his system to be based on the principles of association. Previously, however, to witnessing what might be accomplished by a power which if acquired was capable of being turned to a practical account in daily life, we gave Mr.Stokes the opportunity of testing our own simple method of learning technically various things by triplets, which he admitted was a useful form or phase of mnemonics, so far as it went. It was by such simple method, that, when a post-office closed, the writer was able to learn and remember all the various English, Scotch, Irish and foreign rates of postage in a few weeks whilst the post master
