550 SOME SENSE DEFECTS PSYCHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED. 



through the Berg River Valley, a friend of mine waved his hand 

 towards the scenery and said something of which all I heard 

 sounded like aii'too. ^^'ith this I had two grounds of inference: 

 ( I ) he must mean the Drakenstein Mountains, because that was 

 all he could see from where Tie was; and (2) I knew him to 

 be an incorrigible punster. It took me a full minute to realise 

 that he had gaily said, " These are some of the 'ills that flesh 

 is heir to." To this day, I believe, my friend thinks I was very 

 dense to take so long to see his pun. He docs not know what a 

 conundrum he set me. A still better example shows how a few 

 articulate sounds with their accompanying murmur can be 

 " heard "' when subsequent light is thrown on them. As we were 

 walking in the street, a friend said something to me, of which 

 I caught three syllables, with a vague consciousness of the rest. 

 I tried to fit this into English, and failed. Then suddenly it 

 dawned on me that some people were passing at the time, and 

 my companion might have wanted them not to understand. In 

 that case, he would have spoken Italian. I fitted my raw material 

 together in that language, and after about a hundred yards 1 

 answered him. " You took a jolly long time to reply," he said. 

 " I have only just heard it," I rejoined. 



I add a good example of the value of attention and expecta- 

 tion. There is a big bell within a few yards of my room : its 

 voice is easily heard all over Capetown, but when my door and 

 window are shut I do not hear it at all — unless I prepare for it. 

 I know the time when it is going to ring. I then attune my ear 

 to the musical note it sounds (E flat). Then, if I have hit both 

 time and note rightly, I not only hear the bell, but hear it quite 

 loudly. 



Moreover. I think we are helped more than we know by 

 the vibrations in the bones of the head. If I close both my ears 

 as tightly as I can. I still hear music almost as well as when my 

 ears are open. 



Once more, it is frequentl\- thought that all sound waves 

 travel with a perfectly spherical wave-front. This is true only 

 of stationary sound-centres. When a sound is thrown forward, 

 as in the case of the voice, the side waves are comparatively 

 very weak. No matter how well I am hearing, the moment the 

 speaker turns aside I am lost. I may therefore venture to give 

 some hints equally useful to a public speaker who wants the 

 outside fringe to hear him. and to the private speaker who is 

 dealing with a deaf person: — (i) Throw the voice where you 

 want it to go; (2) do not shout, but articulate; (3) emphasise 

 the really important words, not the links; (4) make sure the 

 topic of each paragraph is known; (5) sustain the voice fully 

 to the end of each sentence, and if you use a falling cadence, let 

 it be a definite one and not a mere trailing into weakness. 



The second defect, that of sight, is much more complex. 

 It is near sight, combined with slow sight, and two-fold retinal 

 hemorrhage supervening. 



