a 
( ex, ) 
which really make misconceptions inevitable, and suggestions 
of falsehood, even where nothing actually false is stated. The 
result is a distorted picture, where even the realities are seen 
in false perspective, and which, though ultimately derived 
from certain extremely veracious and careful reports of eye- 
witnesses, is inconsistent with itself and with the truth. 
Assuming that I am correct in this, I think it is not 
difficult to see how and why the story has become distorted— 
and the same cause, exactly, seems to me to explain its 
popularity. 
The average intelligent human mind is, of course, not like 
a sheet of white paper, ready to receive any marks made upon 
it, and to retain them equally. It is more like a photographic 
film, sensitive to certain rays and practically blind to others, 
and a ray, to take full effect upon it, must have a certain 
minimum of strength and fall on it in certain directions. ‘To 
drop metaphor, the public which reads and reflects on any 
account of a natural phenomenon reported to it by an author 
whom it believes to be reliable, and in such a form as does 
not tax its reasoning powers too severely, but which is neither 
competent nor inclined to undertake an independent investi- 
gation of the facts—this public, I say, is strongly impressed 
by certain of such accounts, and hardly at all by others, 
chiefly if not entirely in proportion as they do or do not 
appeal to certain of its own pre-existing ‘‘ Obsessions.” The 
average human mind has Tastes of its own, just as the body 
has, some of which are especially insistent in particular ages, 
but some of them at least seem to be universal, immemorial, 
and ineradicable. It has a taste, for instance, and always has 
had, for anything which is frankly Paradowical, such as a Fire- 
breathing Dragon or a Flesh-eating Plant, or an animal which 
can turn itself inside out, or be frozen hard without being 
seriously the worse for it. It has a taste for anything which, 
if I may say so, seems to run into extvemes whether in the 
direction of the Infinite or the Infinitesimal—Giants and 
Dwarfs, Aphides producing. offspring by the quadrillion per 
annum ; carcases consumed (as Linné says) more speedily 
by a Blowfly than by a Lion: exquisitely elaborate structures 
only just visible at the highest powers of our most powerful 
