762 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Returning to the human body, we find that very little has been 

 said about the relation of the senses to each other, the order of 

 their development in the evolution of the race, or the present 

 tendency of their relative development. The theory proposed by 

 Democritus, that all our senses have been evolved from the sense 

 of touch, seems likely to be established by biological studies. But 

 it may be more accurate to say that all the senses are specialized 

 forms of a primordial sense, which may have been less like our 

 sense of touch than that of sight. In this connection one recalls, 

 and with somewhat less skepticism, certain recent experiments of 

 the French investigators in abnormal psychology, showing that 

 hypnotized subjects see and hear with their finger-tips.* With 

 the growth of intelligence, there has been a steadily increasing 

 use of the two senses which give us the finest discriminations and 

 the widest knowledge of our surroundings, viz., the senses of 

 sight and hearing. When each animal was obliged to search for 

 and select his own food largely by smell and taste, the latter 

 senses were no doubt the best developed. For tones, colors, and 

 form these animals had little care. They thought, as far as they 

 thought at all, in images of taste and smell, as we think in images 

 of sight and hearing. Many animals now are smell-minded, and 

 in the thoughts and dreams of dogs and deer we may suppose 

 that images of odors are as prominent as visual images are in our 

 own. In man the crude organs of taste and smell have given 

 place to the delicate eye and ear, both as avenues of knowledge 

 and as sources of higher pleasures. What is true of taste and 

 smell is true also of touch. Not confusing this with the muscular 

 sense, the information we get from the sense of touch is small and 

 the pleasure less. That this sense is capable of such remarkable 

 improvement in the case of the blind is evidence only of its once 

 greater use. 



It is not now my purpose, however, to compare the senses of 

 sight and hearing with the lower senses, but with each other. It 

 is, perhaps, not realized by many that there are certain new con- 

 ditions in modern life and certain innovations in our system of 

 education that are bringing the eye into unprecedented impor- 

 tance in comparison with the ear and the other organs of sense ; 

 that this greater relative use of the sense of sight will result in its 

 greater development, while the lessened use of the sense of hear- 

 ing will lead to its deterioration. Such a result would not only 

 threaten several noble fine arts connected with the ear, and inci- 

 dentally weaken the memory, but would also effect an impor- 

 tant change in man's personality. I will try to point out the 



* See Hystero-epilepsie masculine : Suggestion, Inhibition, Transposition des Sens. By 

 Prof. Fontan. Revue Philosophique, August, 1887. 



