It was one of the masters who, sipping a glass of punch, maintained
that only an idiot could imagine that a human brain could remember at
the same time: the three thousand dates mentioned in history; the
names of the five thousand towns situated in all parts of the world;
the names of six hundred plants and seven hundred animals; the bones
in the human body, the stones which form the crust of the earth, all
theological disputes, one thousand French words, one thousand English,
one thousand German, one thousand Latin, one thousand Greek, half a
million rules and exceptions to the rules: five hundred mathematical,
physical, geometrical, chemical formulas. He was willing to prove that
in order to be capable of such a feat the brain would have to be as
large as the cupola of the Observatory at Upsala. Humboldt, he went on
to say, finally forgot his tables, and the professor of astronomy at
Lund had been unable to divide two whole numbers of six figures each.
The newly-fledged under-graduates imagined that they knew six
languages, and yet they knew no more than five thousand words at most
of the twenty thousand which composed their mother tongue. And hadn't
he seen how they cheated? Oh! he knew all their tricks! He had seen
the dates written on their finger nails; he had watched them
consulting books under cover of their desks, he had heard them
whispering to one another! But, he concluded, what is one to do?
Unless one closes an eye to these things, the supply of students is
bound to come to an end.
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