98 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



to one of scores meeting in its own home; it has a neat building 

 free of debt ; it pays a curator a regular, if small, salary ; it has 

 something toward a permanent endowment fund ; with six credit- 

 able volumes of Proceedings, it has a permanent invested fund of 

 ten thousand dollars to perpetuate their publication ; it owns a 

 valuable museum, which is open free to the public, and acts as a 

 constant incentive to develop scientific interest. And all this has 

 oeen done by the academy in a small town in the West, without 

 the assistance of any particularly wealthy patrons. 



-- 



SOURCES OF THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY.* 



By E. W. scripture, 

 yale university. 



PSYCHOLOGY did not begin with the development of its 

 own methods or in the psychological laboratory ; on the 

 contrary, it has been largely the product of other sciences. In 

 most cases the first impulse to the investigation of psychological 

 phenomena was given by the discovery of sources of error in the 

 other sciences which were due to the scientist himself. 



In astronomy Tycho Brahe did not accept his instruments as 

 being correct, but determined their errors ; it was not, however, 

 until centuries later that a suspicion arose concerning the possi- 

 bility of errors in the observer himself. 



Astronomers have to record the time of the passage of heav- 

 enly bodies across parallel lines in the telescope. When the star 

 is about to make its transit the astronomer begins counting the 

 beats of the clock. As the star approaches and passes the line he 

 fixes in mind its place at the last beat before crossing and its 

 place at the first beat after. The position of the line in respect 

 to these two places gives the fraction of a second at which the 

 transit occurred. 



In 1795 the British astronomer royal found that his assistant, 

 working with another telescope at the same time, was making his 

 records too late by half a second. Later on, this amounted to 

 0"8 second. This difference was large enough to seriously disturb 

 the calculations, and, as the astronomer did not suspect that he 

 himself might be wrong, the blame was laid on the assistant.! 

 In 1820 Bessel X systematically compared his observations with 



* From a forthcoming work, The New Psychology (London, Walter Scott ; New York, 

 Scribner). 



f Greenwich Astronomical Observations, 1795, vol. iii, pp. 319, .^89. 



X Astronom. Bcobacht. d. Sternwarte zu Kiinigsberg, Abth. VIII, p. iii; Ahth. Xf, p 

 iv; Abtb. XVIIl, p. iii. 



