In the same year, Master Bassle, who was only thirteen years of age, went through an extraordinary mnemonic performance at Willis's Rooms, London. Five large sheets of paper, closely printed with tables of dates, specific gravities, velocities, planetary distances, &c., were distributed among the visitors, and every one was allowed to ask Master Bassle a question relating to these tables, to which was received a correct answer. He would also name the day of the week on which any day of the month had fallen in any particular year. He could repeat long series of numbers backwards and forwards, and point out the place of any number in the series; and to prove that his powers were not merely confined to the rows of numbers in the printed tables, he allowed the whole company to form a long series, by contributing each two or three digits in the order in which they sat; and then, after studying this series for a few minutes, he committed it to memory, and repeated it entire, both backwards and forwards, from the beginning to the end. These performances are believed to have been not the result of any natural mnemonic power, but of a method to be acquired by any person in the course of twelve lessons.
Zerah Colburn, who excited much interest in London in 1812, was a native of Vermont, in the United States. At six years old, he suddenly showed extraordinary powers of mental calculation. By processes which seemed to be almost unconscious to himself, and were wholly so to others, he answered arithmetical questions of considerable difficulty. When eight years old, he was brought to London, where he astonished many learned auditors and spectators by giving correct solutions to such problems as the following: raise 8 up to the 16th power; give the square root of 106,929; give the cube root of 268,336,125; how many seconds are there in 48 years? The answers were always given in very few minutes—sometimes in a few seconds. He was ignorant of the ordinary rules of arithmetic, and did not know how or why particular modes of process came into his mind. On one occasion, the Duke of Gloucester asked him to multiply 21,734 by 543. Something in the boy's manner induced the Duke to ask how he did it, from which it appeared that the boy arrived at the result by multiplying 65,202 by 181, an equivalent process; but why he made this change in the factors, neither he nor any one else could tell. Zerah Colburn was unlike other boys also in this, that he had more than the usual number of toes and fingers; a peculiarity observable also in his father and in some of his brothers.
An exceptional instance is presented in the case of Mr. Bidder, of this faculty being cultivated to a highly useful purpose. George Parker Bidder, when six years old, used to amuse himself by counting up to 100, then to 1,000, then to 1,000,000: by degrees he accustomed himself to contemplate the relations of high numbers, and used to build up peas, marbles, and shot, into squares, cubes, and other regular figures. He invented processes of his own, distinct from those given in books on arithmetic, and could solve all the usual questions mentally more rapidly than other boys with the aid of pen and paper. When he became eminent as a civil engineer, he was wont to embarrass and baffle the parliamentary counsel on contested railway bills, by confuting their statements of figures almost before the words were out of their mouths. In 1856, he gave to the Institution of Civil Engineers an interesting account of this singular arithmetical faculty—so far, at least, as to show that memory has less to do with it than is generally supposed; the processes are actually worked out seriatim, but with a rapidity almost inconceivable.
The most famous calculator in the last century was Jedediah Buxton, who, in 1754, resided for several weeks at St. John's Gate, Smithfield. This man, though he was the son of a schoolmaster, and the grandson of the vicar of his native parish, Elmeton, in Derbyshire, had never learned to write, but he could conduct the most intricate calculations by his memory alone; and such was his power of abstraction that no noise could disturb him. One who had heard of his astonishing ability as a calculator, proposed to him for solution the following question:—In a body whose three sides measure 23,145,789 yards, 5,642,732 yards, and 54,965 yards, how many cubical eighths-of-an-inch are there? This obtuse reckoning he made in a comparatively short time, although pursuing the while, with many others, his labours in the fields. He could walk over a plot of land and estimate its contents with as much accuracy as if it had been measured by the chain. His knowledge was, however, limited to figures. In 1754, Buxton walked to London, with the express intention of obtaining a sight of the King and Queen, for beyond figures, royalty formed the only subject of his curiosity. In this intention he was disappointed: he was, however, introduced to the Royal Society, whom he called the "volk of the Siety Court." They tested his powers, and dismissed him with a handsome gratuity.
He was next taken by his hospitable entertainer at St. John's Gate, to see Garrick in the character of Richard III. at Drury Lane Theatre, when undazzled by the splendour of the stage appointments, and unmoved by the eloquent passion of the actor, the simple rustic employed himself in reckoning the number of words he heard, and the sum total of the steps made by the dancers; and after the performance of a fine piece of music, he declared that the innumerable sounds had perplexed him.
To these feats may be added the following:—Buxton multiplied a sum of thirty-nine places of figures into itself and even conversed whilst performing it. His memory was so great, that he could leave off and resume the operation at the distant period of a week, or even several months. He said that he was drunk once with reckoning by memory from May 17 until June 16, and then recovered after sleeping soundly for seven hours. The question which occupied him so intensely was the reduction of a cube of upwards of 200,000,000 of miles into barleycorns, and then into hairs'-breaths of an inch in length. He kept an account of all the beer which he had drunk for forty years, which was equal to five thousand one hundred and sixteen pints: of these two thousand one hundred and thirty-two were drunk at the Duke of Kingston's and only ten at his own house.
There was a portrait of Buxton at Rufford Abbey, Nottinghamshire. A print of him was engraved in the Gentleman's Magazine, June, 1754, with this subscription: "Jedediah Buxton. Ætat. 49.—Numeros memini. Virgil." He was married and had several children, and died at the age of 70, in the year 1777.
[Charles Lamb's Cottage at Islington.]
In a very pleasant paper on "Ideal Houses," in No. 4 of the Cornhill Magazine, we find this clever sketch of a few of the amiable eccentricities of our famous Essayist, Charles Lamb:—
"I believe," says the contributor, "more in the influence of dwellings upon human character than in the influence of authority on matters of opinion. The man may seek the house, or the house may form the man; but in either case the result is the same. A few yards of earth, even on this side of the grave, will make all the difference between life and death. If our dear old friend, Charles Lamb, was now alive (and we must all wish he was, if only that he might see how every day is bringing him nearer the crown that belongs only to the Prince of British Essayists), there would be something singularly jarring to the human nerves in finding him at Dalston, but not so jarring in finding him a little farther off at Hackney. He would still have drawn nourishment in the Temple and in Covent Garden; but he must surely have perished if transplanted to New Tyburnia. I cannot imagine him living at Pentonville (I cannot, in my uninquiring ignorance, imagine who Penton was, that he should name a ville?), but I can see a certain appropriate oddity in his cottage at Colebrook Row, Islington.