668 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



risk of losing the power. These men value their gold, not for its 

 own sake, but for its powers. Demonetize it, and see how quickly 

 they will get rid of it ! The associationist theory is, as regards them, 

 entirely at fault. 



With other misers there combines itself with this preference of the 

 power over the act the far more instinctive element of the simple col- 

 lecting propensity. Every one collects money, and when a man of 

 petty ways is smitten with the collecting mania for this object he 

 necessarily becomes a miser. Here again the associationist psychology 

 is wholly at fault. The hoarding instinct prevails widely among ani- 

 mals as well as among men. Professor Silliman has thus described 

 one of the hoards of the California wood-rat, made in an empty stove 

 of an unoccupied house : " I found the outside to be composed entirely 

 of spikes, all laid with symmetry, so as to present the points of the 

 nails outward. In the center of this mass was the nest, composed of 

 finely-divided fibers of hemp-packing. Interlaced with the spikes were 

 the following : about two dozen knives, forks, and spoons ; all the 

 butcher's knives, three in number ; a large carving-knife, fork, and 

 steel ; several large plugs of tobacco, ... an old purse containing 

 some silver, matches, and tobacco ; nearly all the small tools from the 

 tool-closets, with several large augers, ... all of w T hich must have 

 been transported some distance, as they were originally stored in dif- 

 ferent parts of the house. . . . The outside casing of a silver watch 

 was disposed of in one part of the pile, the glass of the same watch in 

 another, and the works in still another." * 



In every lunatic asylum we find the collecting instinct developing 

 itself in an equally absurd way. Certain patients will spend all their 

 time picking pins from the floor and hoarding them. Others collect 

 bits of thread, buttons, or rags, and prize them exceedingly. Now, 

 the " miser " par excellence of the popular imagination and of melo- 

 drama, the monster of squalor and misanthropy, is simply one of these 

 mentally deranged persons. His intellect may in many matters be 

 clear, but his instincts, especially that of ownership, are insane, and 

 their insanity has no more to do with the association of ideas than 

 w T ith the precession of the equinoxes. As a matter of fact his hoard- 

 ing usually is directed to money ; but it also includes almost anything 

 besides. Lately in a Massachusetts town there died a miser who prin- 

 cipally hoarded newspapers. These had ended by so filling all the 

 rooms of his good-sized house from floor to ceiling that his living 

 space was restricted to a few narrow channels between them. Even 

 as I write, the morning paper gives an account of the emptying of a 

 miser's den in Boston by the City Board of Health. "What the owner 

 hoarded is thus described : " He gathered old newspapers, wrapping- 

 paper, incapacitated umbrellas, canes, pieces of common wire, cast-off 

 clothing, empty barrels, pieces of iron, old bones, battered tin-ware, 

 * Quoted in Lindsay, "Mind in Lower Animals," vol. ii, p. 151. 



