460 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1944 
mains to be seen whether its use for this purpose will have much 
practical value: at present the most that can be said is that if we 
had to appoint someone to a responsible post and had an unlimited 
field of candidates, it would be safer to exclude the 5 percent whose 
electroencephalogram showed the most unusual features. 
That is a very long way from saying that the electroencephalogram 
can tell us how the subject will think and act. In fact the information 
which it gives relates to a very limited field. But the limitation 
arises mainly from the fact that we can only record the gross effects 
and not the detailed patterns in the brain. With present methods 
the skull and the scalp are too much in the way, and we need some 
new physical method to read through them. We need the “patent 
double million magnifying gas microscopes of hextra power” with 
which Sam Weller thought he might be able to see through “a flight 
o’ stairs and a deal door.” In these days we may look with some 
confidence to the physicists to produce such an instrument, for it is 
just the sort of thing they can do; but until it is available we have to 
confess, with Sam Weller, that ‘our wision’s limited.” 
