6o4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



bols stand each for an entire word, and it takes thousands of them 

 to make up a language ; alphabetical letters stand each, not for a 

 word, but for an elementary sound or component of a word, and 

 twenty-six of them do (very badly, it is true) for all the needs of our 

 mother English. Just so, each cell or fiber in the brain does not stand 

 for a particular word or a particular idea, but for some element of 

 sensation or memory or feeling that goes to make up the special word 

 or idea in question. Horse is made up of five letters, or of four pho- 

 netic sounds ; it is made up also of a certain form and size and color 

 and mode of motion ; and when we speak of it all these elements are 

 more or less vaguely present to our consciousness, coalescing into a 

 sort of indefinite picture, and calling up one another more or less 

 symbolically. 



This theory at first sight seems to make the explanation of memory 

 far more difficult and abstruse than formerly. For on the old hypoth- 

 esis (never perhaps fully pushed to its extreme in realizable thought 

 by any sensible person) it seemed easy enough to say that every act 

 of perception and every fact learned was the establishment of a line 

 of communication between two or more distinct cells or ganglia in the 

 brain, and that the communication, once fairly established, persisted 

 pretty constantly ever afterward. I am told " Shakespeare was born at 

 Stratf ord-on-Avon " ; and forthwith, cell Shakespeare (or Shakspere, 

 or Shakspear, etc.) has a line run from it to cell birth and cell Stratf ord- 

 on-Avon (a pretty complex one indeed, this last), which line remains 

 from that day forward permeable to any similar exercise of nervous 

 energy. This method is undeniably simple, neat, and effective. But, 

 setting aside the difficulty of realizing that any one tract of the brain 

 can possibly hold our whole vast mental picture of Shakespeare or of 

 Stratford-on-Avon (especially if we have ever read the one or visited 

 the other), there is the grotesque difficulty of the innumerable lines and 

 cross-connections of association. A central telephone station would be 

 the merest child's-play to it. For even so simple a word and idea as 

 gooseberry is capable of arousing an infinite number of ideas and emo- 

 tions. It may lead us at once to the old garden in the home of our 

 childhood, or to the gooseberry-fool we ate yesterday ; it may suggest 

 the notion of playing gooseberry, or the big gooseberry of the news- 

 paper paragraph ; it may lead to etymological dissertation on its deri- 

 vation from gooseberry, allied to north country grosers and French 

 groseille, or it may summon up visions of bad champagne, incidentally 

 leading to *' The Vicar of Wakefield," and the famous wine manufact- 

 ured only by Mrs. Primrose. In fact, I have no hesitation at all in ex- 

 pressing my private opinion that, if the chart of the brain were at all 

 like what most people imagine it to be, the associations of the word 

 gooseberry alone would suffice to give good and solid employment to 

 every fiber, cell, and convolution it anywhere possesses. 



On the other hand, if we regard the brain as mainly dynamical, as 



