62 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



These experiments bear directly and obviously on history and on 

 legal testimony, they show the hollowness of much of what is called 

 historic evidence, and the uselessness of the attempt so often made in 

 court to force or coax witnesses to give the exact language used by 

 them, or to them, or in their presence. I once told a short story to a 

 person who has the most remarkable memory both for words and facts 

 of any one whom I have ever met, and requested him to at once repeat 

 it. He attempted to do so, and not only changed the phraseology, but 

 left out one of the most important details. In some cases I have re- 

 quested the subjects experimented on to wait a week or ten days, and 

 then to write out what they remember, or think they remember, of what 

 was told them. In all cases there will be variations from the original 

 of greater or less importance, according to the nature and complications 

 of the story, and the special memory of the individual. One person, a 

 scholar of unusual verbal memory, after carefully studying a short story, 

 consisting of less than one hundred words, and waiting ten days, made 

 eight blunders. 



In elaborately comparing the recitations of experienced and eminent 

 actors and actresses with the originals of plays, I find that serious 

 verbal changes, both of omission and interpolation, are constantly made. 

 Dramatic teachers say that pupils cannot accurately retain a long part ; 

 that blundering is everywhere the rule. Shakespeare, in his choicest 

 passages, is almost always, unintentionally if not unconsciously, altered 

 even by his most skilled and practised interpreters. 



The statement made by Renan in his latest work, on "The Origins 

 of Christianity," that persons who do not know how to read and write 

 have a better memory for oral communications, is not confirmed by my 

 experiments thus far ; scholars and thinkers remember words and ideas 

 better than the ignorant and unreading classes. Those who do not 

 know how to read and write find it hard, according to my experiments, 

 to retain in memory a short and simple sentence, even for an instant. 

 Not only memory of words, but of facts and objects of common ob- 

 servation, is more limited than is supposed. 



In another series of experiments I tested the power of recalling the 

 objects that fell upon the vision. If a number of persons enter a room 

 containing a number of articles of furniture, with various colors on the 

 walls and in the carpet, and in which certain complex gestures or mo- 

 tions or manoeuvres are made by some one, there will be no agreement 

 in their reports, even if made at once, and no report will be accurate. 



For years philosophers and critics have been asking how long time is 

 required to make a myth. The answer is found in these experiments. A 

 myth can be made in a minute. These interpolations and additions to 

 reported conversations, of the truth of which the reporter, at the time 

 and subsequently, is so fully persuaded, that only by a comparison with 

 the written original can he be undeceived, are the products of the report- 

 er's own mind the unconscious substitution of the subjective for the 



