72 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and a half million pounds were shipped in the seven months ending 

 January 31st. 



We should profit by this experience, try to cultivate friendly 

 relations in parts of the world where advantageous trade connections 

 can be established, instead of following the ignis fatuus of Asiatic 

 expansion. 



1 



THE mXERPRETATION OF ITATURE. 



By EDMUND NOBLE. 



IT is an interesting and suggestive fact in Nature study that at 

 the outset man was thrown utterly upon himself for the very 

 vocabulary of the world-puzzle which presented itself to him for 

 solution. He had not only to unriddle his " inscription in an un- 

 known tongue," but to evolve even the possibility of an explanation 

 out of his inner consciousness. His first theories of the universe were 

 based, not on anything which the cosmos was, independently of him, 

 but upon his own nature and activities as a living animal. This re- 

 sort to himself as his chief means of interpretation resulted from the 

 very nature of the knowing process; for knowledge of things is 

 never in any absolute sense what things are, but is rather what they 

 are like. "When we cognize an object we do it by referring that 

 object to the class of objects which in one or more respects it re- 

 sembles. And as in this process we draw from the objects most 

 familiar to us the principle of explanation which we need for the less 

 familiar things that have not yet become part of our mental pos- 

 sessions, much depends upon priority in the setting up of mental 

 classes, as well as on the strength of the impression which they make 

 upon the mind. The earliest and deepest class impressions are neces- 

 sarily those which arise out of man's knowledge of himself — of his 

 body and the parts thereof, of his corporeal activities, and of his feel- 

 ings and thoughts; next, of the bodies of other men and of their 

 movements; finally, in the order of vividness, of the animate and 

 inanimate objects most nearly related to his life. It is these classes 

 which, by virtue of their priority and strength, naturally acquire 

 dominating influence over all later acquirements, and it is to them 

 that the mind refers the impressions gained from the more remote in- 

 organic world. 



Among the simpler illustrations of the effort man makes to assimi- 

 late the external system to himself are those with which we are more 

 or less familiar in the domain of language. We find them first in the 

 forms for gender by which, in all inflectional tongues, inanimate 

 objects are to this extent likened to living animals. A similar tend- 



