was sent for by the police, in order that he
might be duly examined by the authorities.
They came back after a while, unsuccessful as
to the main object of their mission, but not
unsuccessful altogether either. They had not been
able to find the man, they said, but that mattered
the less as they had found his wife —the old
man's murdered daughter—alive and well, and
had brought her back with them. So here is a
case of a father wrong as to the identity of his
own daughter, just as we have seen before two
sons mistaken as to that of their father, and a
wife in reference to her own husband—for that
Mrs. Banks was mistaken, she has herself
admitted at last.

These difficulties as to identification, which
are so common, must be in some degree
attributable to a certain sluggishness of the observant
faculties which is very prevalent among
us. A seeing, and at the same time a remembering,
eye is a rare gift. No doubt some people
are much more observant as to matters of this
kind than others. If you go to some place,
where there is any special thing to be seen, in
company with one of these, you will be
surprised when you come away, unless you are of
the same observant nature yourself, to find how
much more he will have seen than you have.
No doubt the memory has something to do
with this. The man not only sees, but remembers
what he sees. This is something but not
everything, and there can be no doubt that some
people's eyes really do see more than others.

The most wonderful thing in this way,
however, is the unhesitating manner in which men,
and women too, will sometimes speak on these
questions of identification, when the only
opportunities they have had of forming an opinion
have been such unfavourable ones that, to the
ordinarily constituted mind, it seems nothing
short of miraculous that they should have seen
anything or anybody with any degree of
distinctness or certainty. Cases illustrative of this
phenomenon are, however, by no means
uncommon. Thus we read of an old lady and her
servant, living in some lonely country house,
which is attacked in the dead of night by
burglars, one of whom, bursting open a window,
assaults the old lady, while another attacks the
maid. This last resists violently, and in the
struggle a portion of the crape worn over the
man's face gets deranged. There is no light, or
only the limited supply to be got from an upset
rushlight, or an expiring lantern left on the
window-sill by the thieves. Yet a month afterwards
this servant girl goes to a court of justice
and swears to her burglar, whom she has seen
walking in the prison yard, in company with a
dozen other gentlemen in similar difficulties.

So again with the unfortunate who falls into
the hands of the garotters. He is attacked in
some lonely suburban road, knocked on the head,
half suffocated by the bear-like hug with which
the operation of garotting seems generally to
begin, the night is dark and there is not a
gaslamp within a hundred yards, and yet it will
sometimes happen that a fortnight afterwards,
when the victim of this assault is sufficiently
recovered to give evidence in court, he will be
able to identify the ruffians by whom he was
assailed—or at least one of them—and that with
little or no misgiving as to the accuracy of his
memory.

Is this sort of memory—eye-memory it may
be called—a special gift, the property of a
special few, or may it be acquired and cultivated
by any who choose to try after it? To a certain
extent it may. I remember on one occasion
having to pay a rather large sum of money
by cheque into a certain bank, determining—
as I knew it was not their practice to give
receipts for cheques so paid—to take the
precaution of specially noticing the personal
appearance of the clerk to whom I gave the
money, in order that I might be certain to
recognise him if there was any subsequent
misunderstanding in connexion with the transaction.
My doing so turned out, of course, to be
entirely unnecessary, but still the face which I
had registered in my memory did remain there,
and it is certain that at any time, within a
month, I could easily have identified it.

And so in another way 1 have known instances
of men engaged in literary pursuits who—
having to report the particulars of some pageant
or other notable scene, and knowing beforehand
that a minute description of the external
characteristics of such scene would be required
of them—have brought this observant faculty
to bear upon all the special peculiarities of the
scene in question, registering them in that eye-
memory of which mention has just been made,
and holding the remembrance of them till such
time as the circumstantial account of them
could be written down—and no longer; just as
by an act of ordinary memory men will retain
in their mind difficult statistics and intricate
calculations of figures till the occasion for which
these have been required is past, and will then
in due time forget them altogether.

These are all instances of the observant
faculty brought into action at will, and they
suggest irresistibly the possibility, and perhaps
desirableness, of a further and more general
use of that power than we most of us make.
There is not the least doubt that we might
cultivate this faculty more than we do, and often
to useful purpose. When we find ourselves
engaged in any transaction at all removed from
the routine of ordinary life, and in which other
persons besides ourselves are mixed up, we
should by all means make a point of noting
the external characteristics of such strangers,
with a view to their subsequent identification if
necessary. When the French gentleman accosts
us in the public street, and begs us to interpret
to him an address which he has got
written down on a piece of paper—such
application being immediately followed by a request
for assistance of a more substantial kind—it is
desirable to bestow a searching glance upon
that French gentleman's physiognomy before
declining the honour of a more protracted
conversation with him. When the Hungarian