136 MENTAL EVOLUTION IN ANIMALS. 



hitherto unpublished observations of my own, which has 

 served to display a positively astonishing difference between 

 different individuals with respect to the rate at which they 

 are able to read. Of course reading implies enormously 

 intricate processes of perception both of the sensuous and of 

 the intellectual order ; but if we choose for these observa- 

 tions persons who have been accustomed to read much, we 

 may consider that they are all very much on a par with 

 respect to the amount of practice which they have had, so 

 that the differences in their rates of reading may fairly be 

 attributed to real differences in their rates of forming com- 

 plex perceptions in rapid succession, and not to any merely 

 accidental differences arising from greater or less facility 

 acquired by special practice. 



My experiments consisted in marking a brief printed 

 paragraph in a book which had never been read by any of 

 the persons to whom it was to be presented. The paragraph, 

 which contained simple statements of simple facts, was 

 marked on the margin with pencil. The book was then 

 placed before the reader open, the page however being covered 

 with a sheet of paper. Having pointed out to the reader 

 upon this sheet of paper what part of the underlying page 

 the marked paragraph occupied, I suddenly removed the 

 sheet of paper with one hand, while I started a chronograph 

 with the other. Twenty seconds being allowed for reading 

 the paragraph (ten lines octavo), as soon as the time was up I 

 again suddenly placed the sheet of paper over the printed 

 page, passed the book on to the next reader, and repeated the 

 experiment as befoi^e. Meanwhile the first reader, the 

 moment after the book had been removed, wrote down all 

 that he or she could remember having read. And so on with 

 all the other readers. 



Now the results of a number of experiments conducted on 

 this method were to show, as 1 have said, astonishing differ- 

 ences in the maximum rate of reading which is possible to 

 different individuals, all of whom have been accustomed to 

 extensive reading. That is to say, the difference may amount 

 to 4 to 1 ; or, otherwise stated, in a given time one indi- 

 vidual may be able to read four times as much as another. 

 Moreover, it appeared that there was no relationship b,etween 

 slowness of reading and power of assimilation ; on the con- 

 trary, when aU the efforts are directed to assimilatiu'^ 



