1 36 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



different that it looks brighter ? So it seems to the man's own ' com- 

 mon sense.' Or is the difference subjective only, in the man himself, 

 who has lost his bearings to the outside world ? 



" The revered sage of Los Gatos, Brother Ambrose Bierce, tells the 

 story of a man who visited a naturalist in San Francisco, and remained 

 over night as a guest. The naturalist was fond of snakes and had 

 several of them in the house. When the visitor retired at night he 

 looked under the bed and found a great coiled serpent, who watched 

 him with glittering eyes. These eyes made some strange impression on 

 him, and in the morning the people of the house found their guest 

 kneeling on the floor, dead, his open eyes still staring in horror at the 

 thing under the bed. This thing was the stuffed skin of a kingsnake 

 with two shoe-buttons for eyes. The ' common sense ' of the man told 

 him that the snake was charming him, and in the belief that he was 

 charmed to a horrible death he must have perished. If he had not 

 believed that snakes have the power to ' charm ' and to kill, surely he 

 would not have died. 



" It is said that a ship once landed on a barren island in the Pacific 

 Ocean. Its passengers brought with them the materials for a house, 

 which they set up, to the surprise of the natives who had never seen 

 a wooden house before. They put in it blankets and cooking utensils, 

 and after a day or two they set up near the house on a solid foundation 

 a long tube through which they gazed by turns at the sun. After 

 watching the sun for a single day, they hastily returned to the ship, 

 carrying the long tube and the blankets, but leaving the house and 

 everything else of value on the island. The delighted natives took 

 possession of the house and they hold it to this day. But they look in 

 vain for the return of the foolish people who left it there. 



" Men who have traveled in Mexico tell me that all along the coasts 

 of Sinaloa, people are engaged in digging for buried treasures under 

 the direction of men or women in San Francisco. These people have 

 never been in Mexico, but they are said to have the power of seeing 

 clearly objects not before them, in any part of the earth. There is 

 a very old legend current which tells that a pirate ship, hard pressed 

 by the Mexican soldiers, landed on the Cape of Camarron near Nazatlan, 

 where the buccaneers hastily buried a vast treasure of silver, after which 

 they all fled. A man is engaged to-day in boring a tunnel into solid 

 granite and lava to find the treasures thus laid away. A woman, in a 

 shabby Sacramento Street boarding house, claims to see in her trances 

 the inner secrets of the mountains and directs all these operations. Our 

 common sense or our experience may condemn the whole operation as 

 ridiculous but the transit of Venus seemed equally absurd to the local 

 critics who occupy its abandoned shelter. 



" One man takes a forked rod of witch-hazel, and, going over a tract 



