IMITATION AMONG ATOMS AND ORGANISMS. 503 



in literature, science, art, or philosophy inspires a thousand imi- 

 tators. All composition, whether of prose or poetry, is in the 

 ground of it imitative a fact sufBciently suggested by the 

 grotesquely moral turn ordinarily given to college and school 

 essays, by the accession of literary power which always follows 

 much reading, and by the imitation of any particular author or 

 style to which great liking for one or the other inevitably leads. 

 What has been called the contagiousness of example is really the 

 power of a strong impression, and therefore practically of stress, 

 to produce likeness. This may be noticed at public meetings, 

 where people applaud or cheer gregariously, and do other acts, 

 such as those of sitting or standing, with obvious reference to 

 what others are doing. The ease with which a stammerer com- 

 municates his defect to another is a matter of common observa- 

 tion. Movements or actions of persons sitting together, such as 

 yawning, coughing, and the like, tend to be propagated more or 

 less through the whole of them by unconscious imitation. To the 

 same process is due the spread of more or less hysterical ailments 

 among a company of persons, such as the often-recorded mania 

 for mewing among nuns, or the propagation of convulsions among 

 girls in factories. Simple movements, like the shifting of a chair, 

 the rustling of a paper, audible change in the position of the body^ 

 often follow involuntarily in others after they have occurred in 

 one of the persons associated. If in a thoroughfare a man be 

 encountered staring intently and conspicuously at some portion 

 of the sky, most of those who see him will at once direct their 

 gaze in the same direction. A man watching an athletic feat, or 

 a stroke at billiards, in which he is deeply interested, will often 

 at a critical moment imitate the attitudes or action of the per- 

 former. 



The law is further abundantly illustrated by facts relating to 

 the lower animals. These find the greatest ease of association as 

 likes, and come together everywhere in Nature on the ground of 

 likeness. The general evidence of this is familiar, and mention 

 need be made here only of a representative example. In the 

 Falkland Islands, for instance, where the cattle have run wild, 

 and where they are of several different colors, each color keeps in 

 a separate herd, often restricted to one part of the island ; among 

 the wild horses of Paraguay, those of the same color and size 

 associate with each other ; in Circassia three races of horses exist 

 which, when living in freedom, always refuse to mingle and cross; 

 on the Faroe Islands the half- wild, native black sheep resist at- 

 tempts to breed them with imported white sheep ; in the Forest 

 of Dean and the New Forest the dark and pale colored herds of 

 fallow deer have never been known to mingle ; the merino and 

 heath sheep of Scotland, if the two flocks are mixed together, will 



