132 THE IMPHOVEMENT OP THE MIND. will fix it more in the mind than reading it five times: And in the same manner, if we had a plan of the naked lines of longi- tude and latitude, projected on the meridian printed for this use, a learner might much more speedily advance himself in the knowledge of geography by his own drawing the figures of all the parts of the world upon it by imitation, than by many days survey of a map of theworld so printed. The same also may be said concerning the constellations of heaven, drawn by the learner on a naked projection of the circles of the sphere upon the piane of the equator. 10. It has sometimes been the practice of men to imprint names or sentences on their memory, by taking the first let- ters of every word of that sentence, or of those names, and snaking a new word out of them. So the name of the Mac- cabees is borrowed from the first letters of the Hebrew words which make that sentence Mi Camoka Baelimn Jehovah, that is, who is like thee among the gods ? Which was written on their banners. Jesus Christ our Saviour bath been called a fish, by the fathers, because these are the first letters of those Greek words, Jesus Christ, God's Son, the Saviour. So the word vibgyor teaches us to remember the other of the seven original colours, as they appear by the sun -beams cast through a prism on a white paper, or formed by the sun in a rainbow, ac- cording to the different refrangibility of the rays, viz. violet, in digo, blue, green, yellow, orange and red. In this manner the Hebrew grammarians teach their stu- dents to remember the letterswhich change their natural pronun- ciation by the inscription of a dagesh, by gathering these six letters, beth, gimel, daleth, caph, pe and than, into the word begadchephat ; and that they might not forget the letters named quiescent, viz. a, h, v, and 2, they are joined in the word ahem*. So the universal and particular propositions in logic, are remem- bered by the words barbara, celarent, darü, 4-c. Other artificial helps to memory may be just mentioned here. Dr. Grey in his book called Memoria Technica, has ex- changed the figures 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, for some consonants, b, d, t, f; 1, y, p, le,.n, and some vowels, a, e, i, o, 22, and several diphthongs, and thereby formed words that denote numbers, whichmay be more easily remembered : and Mr. Lowe has im- proved his scheme in a small pamphlet called Mnemonics De- lineated, whereby in seven leaves he has comprized almost an infinity of things in science and in common life, and redueed them to a sort of measure like Latin verse ; though the words may be supposed to be very barbarous, being such a mixture of vowels and consonants as are very unfit for harmony. But after all, the very writers on this subject have confessed, that several of these artificial helps of memory are so cumbersome as not to
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