AUTUMN, 1912 



-°5 



The other answered tliat it was because Wells was 

 the only town in England where, sitting at ease in his 

 study, he could listen to the cries of wild geese. 



To me, just a naturalist, these same cries were even 

 more than to that famous man: to sit still and do any 

 work wliere I heard them was the difficulty. Thus was 

 I pulled two ways, and my state was that of being in, 

 or between, "two minds." My wish was that these 

 same two minds could have two bodies with sets of 

 senses complete, so that each might be able to follow 

 its own line. I envied the chameleon just then — a 

 strange creature which is said to change its colour ac- 

 cording to its surroundings. That, however, is merely 

 a physical condition, one which it shares with certain 

 other creatures without any mind at all, or in which 

 the mind is dormant, as, for example, in some chrysalids. 

 It is a minor mystery; the big mystery of the chame- 

 leon, the pretty problem for the students of animal 

 psychology, is the divisibility of its mind, the faculty 

 of being two persons in one body, each thinking and 

 acting independently of the other. Observe him in a 

 domestic state, sitting on a branch in a room, in ap- 

 pearance a deformed lizard, or the skeleton of one, 

 encased in a discoloured, granulated skin, long dried 

 to a parchment. The most remarkable feature is the 

 head, which reminds one of a grotesque mediaeval 

 car\'ing in or on some old church, of a toad-like or 

 fish-like human creature, with a countenance expressive 

 of some ancient, forgotten kind of wisdom. He is abso- 

 lutely motionless, dead or asleep one might imagine; 



