206 E. B. TITCHENER— ETHNOLOGICAL TESTS OF SENSATION. 



finds them relevant to the issues discussed, the credit is largely due 

 to the fullness with which the authors of the Report have written. 

 They remind us, time and again, that human nature is much the same 

 the world over. The old lady on Murray Island who, " by associa- 

 tions of some kind," gave her own and her friends' names when she 

 was asked to name a set of colored papers, have we not met her — 

 with all respect be it spoken — in our summer sessions? The man 

 who was asked to arrange the colors in the order of his liking, and 

 who handed them back in almost exactly the order in which they 

 had been presented by the experimenter in an earlier test, is a fairly 

 familiar figure in our laboratories. If, then, I presently compare 

 the observations of my colleagues with those of a Papuan chief, I 

 am not necessarily falling into absurdity. 



I. The Delicacy of Tactile Discrimination. 



I begin with McDougall's experiment upon the limen of dual im- 

 pression upon the skin. His conclusion is as follows : '' These figures 

 indicate that in the skin areas tested the Murray Islanders have a 

 threshold of tactile discrimination of which the value, in terms of 

 distance of two points touched, is just about one half that of English- 

 men, or we may say in other words, that their power of tactile dis- 

 crimination is about double that of Englishmen. And ... we may 

 assume that this result is true for all or most parts of the skin."- 

 I shall try to show that the conclusion does not follow from the ex- 

 perimental data. 



McDougall used " a small pair of carpenter's dividers with blunt 

 metal points." 



" These two points were applied to the skin simultaneously with light 

 pressure lasting about one second. The subject was told to keep his eyes 

 shut, and the area of the skin operated on was further guarded from his 

 view. ... He was told to say 'one' or 'two' according as he judged that 

 one or both points touched his skin. . . . The threshold that I sought was 

 . . . not that distance at which two points can be distinctly felt, but a slightly 

 lower one, that distance at which they yield a sensation perceptibly different 

 from that yielded by a single point. 



" One point was applied in every experiment about as frequently as the 

 two points. ... In order to keep the attention and interest of the subject as 

 keen as possible, I found it necessary to tell him after each answer whether 



2 R, 192, 195. 



