OCR Rendition - approximate

82   Inquiries into. Human Faculty

which closely confirm one another, nor of the general accuracy of the accompanying sketches, because I find now that my collection is large enough for classification, that they might be arranged in an approximately continuous series. I am often told that the peculiarity is common to the speaker and to some near relative, and that they had found such to be the case by accident. I have the strongest evidence of its hereditary character after allowing, and over-allowing, for all conceivable influences of education and family tradition.

Last of all, I took advantage of the opportunity afforded by a meeting of the Anthropological Institute to read a memoir there on the subject, and to bring with me many gentlemen well known in the scientific world, who have this habit of seeing numerals in Forms, and whose diagrams were suspended on the walls. Amongst them are Mr. G. Bidder, Q.C., the Rev. Mr. G. Henslow, the botanist; Prof. Schuster, F.R.S., the physicist; Mr. Roget, Mr. Woodd Smith, and Colonel Yule, C.B., the geographer. These diagrams are given in Plate I. Figs. 20—24. I wished that some of. my foreign correspondents could also have been present, such as M. Antoine d’Abbadie, the well-known French traveller and Membre de l’Institut, and Baron v. Osten Sacken, the Russian diplomatist and entomologist, for they had given and procured me much information.

I feel sure that I have now said enough to remove doubts as to the authenticity of my data. Their trustworthiness will, I trust, be still more apparent as I proceed; it has been abundantly manifest to myself from the internal evidences in a large mass of correspondence, to which I can unfortunately do no adequate justice in a brief memoir. It remains to treat the data in the same way as any other scientific facts and to extract as much meaning from them as possible.

The peculiarity in question is found, speaking very roughly, in about 1 out of every 30 adult males or 15 females. It consists in the sudden and automatic appearance of a vivid arid invariable “Form” in the mental field of view, whenever a numeral is thought of; in which each numeral has its own definite place. This Form may consist of a mere line of any shape, of a peculiarly arranged row or rows of figures, or of a shaded space.