Of all the
interpretations, it is the one which, for the moment, appears to
me the least eccentric and the most natural.
We have seen that the gift of handling colossal figures is almost
foreign to the intelligence proper; one can, even declare that,
in certain cases, it is evidently and completely independent of
such intelligence. In these cases, the gift is manifested prior
to any education and from the earliest years of childhood. If we
refer to the list of arithmetical prodigies given by Dr.
Scripure,[1] we see that the faculty made its appearance in
Ampere at the age of three, in Colburn at six, in Gauss at three,
in Mangiamele at ten, in Safford at six, in Whateley at three,
and so on. Generally, it lasts for only a few years, becoming
rapidly enfeebled with age and usually vanishing suddenly at the
moment when its possessor begins to go to school.
[1] American Journal of Psychology, 1 April 1891.
When you ask those children and even most of the lightning
calculators who have come to man's estate how they go to work to
solve the huge and complicated problems set them, they reply that
they know nothing about it. Bidder, for instance, declares that
it is impossible for him to say how he can instinctively tell the
logarithm of a number consisting of seven or eight figures. It is
the same with Safford, who, at the age of ten, used to do in his
head, without ever making a mistake, multiplication-sums the
result of which ran into thirty-six figures.
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