The first-sight phenomena of historic time, and the ocular mechanism of historic memory : developing organic principles for the most rapid possible acquisition and affixment of historical knowledge, and forming an elucidatory and illustrative companion to the fifth edition, coloured, of Major Bell's twenty-five royal folio synchrono-historic and biographic tables / by Major James Bell.

  • Bell, James, Major.
Date:
1853
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The first-sight phenomena of historic time, and the ocular mechanism of historic memory : developing organic principles for the most rapid possible acquisition and affixment of historical knowledge, and forming an elucidatory and illustrative companion to the fifth edition, coloured, of Major Bell's twenty-five royal folio synchrono-historic and biographic tables / by Major James Bell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    BARBARISM. attaches to their having transmitted us such records, will he the importance of our consulting such records; or, in other words, of attentively pursuing that hranch of study which it is the ohject of our present labour to develope and to recommend. And History, which is naturally the professional and indispensable study of the statesman and legis- lator, and of all who have influence upon the enact- ment of laws, is scarcely less imperatively demanded in every other class of educated society. It is equally required in the gentleman and the (transmarine) traveller; and, above all, History and Heroism being so intimately united, it is required in the high-minded warrior. To be ignorant of the past, saith Cicero, is to dwell in perpetual infancy! What is the fleeting existence of man if it combine not the memory of the past, with the perception of the present ? But before mankind attain to a competency for writing History, or of transmitting, even in the rudest form, any regularly-connected record of the transactions of their day, or of the events which befall them, millenniums may be literally said to pass away. To substantiate this assertion we need not resort to Hindoo, to Chinese, or to Japanese chronology, nor yet to Buffon's Ages of the World, nor, indeed, to any other computation wearing an appearance of extravagance; but sim- ply take the lowest of the three different compu- tations that have been drawn from the Hebrew