TEE EARTEQUAKE OF MAY 26, 1909 161 



vision of things impending. Here also the bias of earlier experience 

 and of training plays an important role. Eemembering the recent dis- 

 asters in Europe, Italian laborers in Chicago quit work to fall on their 

 knees and pray. Eecalling a prophecy of the coming of the end of the 

 world three days later, some Zionists are reported to have concluded 

 that the earthquake was the beginning of the fulfillment of the proph- 

 ecy. Some persons who had left their houses, refused for hours to enter 

 them again, fearing a repetition of the earthquake. A prisoner in a 

 jail is said to have speculated on his chances of getting away, in case 

 the walls of the jail would fall, and some people in Chicago feared the 

 coming of a " tidal " wave from Lake Michigan. 



It is well known that afferent impulses, especially if they are pow- 

 erful, have the effect of inhibiting or interfering with central psychic 

 activities. Such inhibition was probably responsible for the forgetful- 

 ness of a reporter who sent in his account of the earthquake in a 

 neighboring city to a newspaper in Clinton, but forgot to affix his 

 signature. It explains also the action of a woman in a hospital, who 

 was walking on crutches and who ran out without them, to escape from 

 the building. With the inhibition of man's reason, his instincts take 

 its place, and it would seem that many of our instinctive actions are 

 not much different from those of the brute. They are exemplified in 

 the panics that took place in a few factories and schools. When people 

 rushed from buildings and started to run on the streets, they acted on 

 instinctive impulses. These actions must have been prompted by a 

 nervous mechanism quite like the mechanism that started several run- 

 away horses in places where the earthquake was sufficiently severe to 

 appear alarming. The launching of sensational rumors during a gen- 

 eral excitement is traceable to a related instinct, only more refined and 

 exclusively human. The reflex was started on this occasion by a fire in 

 a kitchen in Aurora, and the reaction announced that " Aurora is 

 burning up." 



One phenomenon in this connection is almost embarrassing to 

 mention, in view of the present growing sentiment in favor of women's 

 rights and woman suffrage. It appears from the effects of the recent 

 earthquake on the American people, that human reason is more readily 

 inhibited in the gentler sex and in children, than in men. The state- 

 ment may be worded in another, and perhaps a better way, by saying 

 that human instincts are relatively stronger in woman than in man. 

 This statement will hardly pass as anything new. This distinction is 

 implied in the wording of one report, which states that " men were 

 excited, women and children frightened." It is stated that in Du- 

 buque a panic was narrowly averted in a shop where women worked. 

 In an office building in the same city it happened that the women 

 rushed in a panic to the stairs, and that men met them and quieted 

 them. In a home for young women the jar is said to have " scared the 



