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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.
