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POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



istics of the operator and give ' per- 

 sonal quality ' to the work itself. 

 About twenty-five years ago, being 

 much interested in problems of this 

 kind (more than at the present mo- 

 ment), I spent many 'odd' and gen- 

 erally otherwise unusable quarter and 

 half hours in pitching a stick into the 

 air and noting whether it fell across 

 any of a series of parallel lines drawn 

 on a plane surface upon which it 

 dropped. This cheerful occupation 

 was continued until the stick had 

 been thrown 20,000 times, and then 

 the number of times it had fallen upon 

 a line was compared with the number 

 indicated by theory. It so happens 

 that according to theory this experi- 

 ment ought to determine the value of 

 that important constant, the ratio of 

 the circumference to the diameter of a 

 circle, and in the present instance it 

 promised for a time to do this in a 

 most satisfactory manner. Indeed at 

 the end of about 12,000 throws the 

 value of ' 7r ' was determined correctly 

 to three decimal places and nearly cor- 

 rectly in the fourth. But from this 

 time on the graphically constructed line 

 of the experiment began to depart very 

 slightly but very persistently from the 

 line of theory and continued to do so 

 to the end. The explanation was easy, 

 it being evident that the operation 

 which was intended to be purely me- 

 chanical was not so. There was pres- 

 ent an unconscious personal element 

 which interfered with the regularity of 

 the work, to a very minute degree, it is 

 true, but the effect of which became 

 manifest when the run teas long. The 

 deviation was due to a, perhaps, very 

 rarely occurring error of judgment in 

 determining a single fact of the ex- 

 periment, but in the long run these 

 errors leaned towards one side, and this 

 was beautifully revealed in the graphic 

 exhibit of the whole series. I do not 

 recommend the process as a means of 

 determining errors of this kind, for it 

 is altogether too laborious, and besides, 

 I have not found it necessary, kind 

 friends having generally kept me well 



informed as to my errors in judgment. 

 What I want to illustrate and em- 

 phasize is the importance of my be- 

 ing unconscious of this bias, which 

 otherwise would have destroyed the 

 value of the whole experiment. It is 

 the ' unconscious touch ' which most 

 surely identifies personality in any 

 artistic performance. It is likely that 

 Raphael never meant to paint two 

 Madonnas alike, indeed it is likely that 

 he would generally make some effort to 

 have each different from all that he had 

 done before, but all have something in 

 common, unsuspected by the artist but 

 known to the expert and furnishing a 

 practically sure means of identification. 

 Moreover, these unconscious technical- 

 ities of an artist, the key to identifica- 

 tion, are most frequently known and 

 utilized by persons who have little 

 knowledge and less appreciation of the 

 real artistic qualities of the works 

 which they compare (see Ruskin on the 

 identification of old masters), the 

 operation being the more certain as it 

 is more purely mechanical. It is 

 within the memory of most of those 

 who will read this that the result of a 

 national election together with the 

 whole character and policy of the na- 

 tional government narrowly escaped be- 

 ing determined by the skillful intro- 

 duction of a single phrase of only three 

 words into a letter which afterwards 

 proved to be a forgery. So character- 

 istic of the alleged author was this 

 phrase that at first even those who 

 knew him best were reluctant to deny 

 its authenticity. And yet I have ex- 

 cellent reasons for believing that the 

 distinguished statesman whose splendid 

 career was thus imperilled was entirely 

 unconscious of the uncommon fre- 

 quency with which this phrase occurred 

 in his speaking and in his writing. It 

 is because the scheme of the ' character- 

 istic curve ' lends itself to the devel- 

 opment in a purely mechanical way of 

 idiosyncrasies of which the author 

 must be unconscious that it is thought 

 to have some value as a means of 

 identification. It may be that this as- 



