This connection between the topical space of book pages andcabinet interiors was reinforced by the very word, loculus, which Linnaeus generally used to referto cabinet compartments. This term was diminutive of locus, that is, the word employed by clas-sical orators to denote a ‘place’ in the mind reserved for related ideas or concepts. Early modernhumanists drew direct analogies between the label assigned to such places in the mind and theheads that they used to gloss the content of quotations and personal observations. This relationshipbetween the ‘space’ of the mind and space on the page facilitated the logic of commonplacing all
the way through the eighteenth century.
Direct linguistic analogies for commonplacing one's notes and the placing of ideas into the memory via the word locus.
