Also, when I have to make an
arithmetical calculation, I have to do it step by step with pencil and
paper, slowly, reluctantly, and with so little confidence in the result
that I dare not act on it without 'proving' the sum by a further
calculation involving more ciphering. But there are men who can neither
read, write, nor cipher, to whom the answer to such sums as I can do
is instantly obvious without any conscious calculation at all; and the
result is infallible. Yet some of these natural arithmeticians have but
a small vocabulary; are at a loss when they have to find words for any
but the simplest everyday occasions; and cannot for the life of them
describe mechanical operations which they perform daily in the course of
their trade; whereas to me the whole vocabulary of English literature,
from Shakespear to the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica,
is so completely and instantaneously at my call that I have never had
to consult even a thesaurus except once or twice when for some reason I
wanted a third or fourth synonym. Again, though I have tried and failed
to draw recognizable portraits of persons I have seen every day for
years, Mr Bernard Partridge, having seen a man once, will, without more
strain than is involved in eating a sandwich, draw him to the life.
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