Allow a human being to be gifted with his five senses, exquisitely attuned for the conveyance of those perceptions, which the separate organs and common sensory are destined to receive: let him during fifty, or as many thousand years, scent the most delicious perfumes,--convey to his palate the flavour of the choicest viands,--to his eyes, present the fairest prospects in nature,--impart to his ear the sweetest music, and regale his touch with smoothness and warmth; moreover let him be conscious of each individual perception he receives:--what would he be at the expiration of this period, without recollection? He would be no more than a sheet of white paper, that had been carried round the world to receive, through the camera obscura, its most delightful views; or the bare walls of Westminster Abbey, after the commemoration of Handel. Perception and consciousness, therefore, although indispensable to the building up of mind, are by themselves inefficient and useless without the adjunct of memory. The writers who have treated of the human faculties, have usually and properly bestowed an elaborate investigation to the developement of this interesting subject: indeed, when men first began to describe the operations of their own minds, it might be expected that they would treat copiously of its most important function; but the nature of this endowment has received no elucidation from the aggregate of their labours. The term memory has been Anglicised from the Latin Memoria; yet we possess two other words of similar meaning, and from their derivation, in a certain degree, explanatory of this process; namely, to REMEMBER and RECOLLECT. Thus if an individual have seen any particular animal, and given sufficient attention to perceive accurately its construction, so as to possess a complete perception of the different parts or _members_ of which it is composed; he would, in the absence of the animal, be enabled to remember it. If his hand had been duly educated he might form its model, or chisel it from a block of marble; or on a plain surface, according to the rules of art, might make a drawing of the animal, and with such exactitude of its different _members_, that it would appear to those who compared it with the original, that he perfectly _re-membered_ it. To recollect is only a different figure for the same process, and implies to re-gather or collect, those parts which have been scattered in different directions.