May 12, 1887] 



NATURE 



29 



words, because they take me as long to form as it does to speak 

 or to hear them, and much longer than it takes to read them by 

 eye (which I never do in imagination). There is no time in 

 fencing for such a process. Again, I have many recollections 

 of scrambles in wild places, one of which is still vivid, of 

 crossing a broad torrent from stone to stone, over some of which 

 the angry-looking water was washing. I was intellectually 

 wearied when I got to the other side, from the constant care and 

 intentness with which it had been necessary to exercise the 

 judgment. During the crossing, I am sure, for similar reasons 

 to those already given, that I was mentally mute. It may be 

 objected that no true thought is exercised in the act of picking 

 one's way, as a goat could do that, and much better than a man. 

 I grant this as regards the goat, but deny the inference, because 

 picking the way under difficult conditions does, I am convinced, 

 greatly strain the attention and judgment. In simple algebra, 

 I never use mental words. Latterly, for example, I had some 

 common arithmetic series to sum, and worked them out, not by 

 the use of the formula, but by the process through which the 

 formula is calculated, and that without the necessity of any 

 mental word. Let us suppose the question was, how many 

 strokes were struck by a clock in twelve hours (not counting the 

 half-hours), then I should have written i, 2 . . . ; and below it, 

 12, II, ... ; then 2 .... 13 x 12, then 13 x 6 = 78. Addi- 

 tion, as De Morgan somewhere insisted, is far more swiftly done 

 by the eye alone : the tendency to use mental words should be 

 withstood. In simple geometry I always work with actual or 

 mental lines ; in fact, I fail to arrive at the full conviction that a 

 problem is fairly taken in by me, unless I have contrived some- 

 how to disembarrass it of words. 



Prof. Max Miiller says that no one can think of a dog without 

 mentally using the word dog, or its equivalent in some other 

 language, and he offers this as a crucial test of the truth of his 

 theory. It utterly fails with me. On thinking of a dog, the 

 name at once disappears, and I find myself mentally in that same 

 expectant attitude in which I should be if I were told that a dog 

 was in an obscure part of the room or just coming round the 

 corner. I have no clear visual image of a dog, but the sense 

 of an ill-defined spot that might shape itself into any speci- 

 fied form of dog, and that might jump, fawn, snarl, bark, or do 

 anything else that a dog might do, but nothing else, I address 

 myself in preparation for any act of the sort, just as when 

 standing before an antagonist in fencing I am ready to meet 

 any thrust or feint, but exclude from my anticipation every 

 movement that falls without the province of fair fencing. 



He gives another test of a more advanced mental process, 

 namely, that of thinking of the phrase "cogito ergo sum" with- 

 out words. I addressed myself to the task at a time when I was 

 not in a mood for introspection, and was bungling over it when 

 I insensibly lapsed into thinking, not for the first time, whether 

 the statement was true. After a little, I surprised myself hard 

 at thought in my usual way — that is, without a word passing 

 through my mind. I was alternately placing myself mentally in 

 the attitude of thinking, and then in that of being, and of 

 watching how much was common to the two processes. 



It is a serious drawback to me in writing, and still more in 

 explaining myself, that I do not so easily think in words as 

 otherwise. It often happens that after being hard at work, and 

 having arrived at results that are perfectly clear and satisfactory 

 to myself, when I try to express them in language I feel that I 

 must begin by putting myself upon quite another intellectual 

 plane. I have to translate my thoughts into a language that 

 does not run very evenly with them. I therefore waste a vast 

 deal of time in seeking for appropriate words and phrases, and 

 am conscious, when required to speak on a sudden, of being 

 often very obscure through mere verbal maladroitness, and not 

 through want of clearness of perception. This is one of the 

 small annoyances of my life. I may add that often while 

 engaged in thinking. out something I catch an accompaniment 

 of nonsense words, just as the notes of a song might accompany 

 thought. Also, that after I have made a mental step, the 

 appropriate word frequently follows as an echo ; as a rule, it 

 does not accompany it. 



Lastly, I frequently employ nonsense words as temporary 

 symbols, as the logical x and y of ordinary thought, which is a 

 practice that, as may well be conceived, does not conduce to 

 clearness of exposition. So much for my own experiences, 

 which I hold to be fatal to that claim of an invariable dependence 

 between thoughts and words which Prof. Max Miiller postulates 

 as the ground of his anthropological theories. 



As regards the habits of others, at the time when I was 

 inquiring into the statistics of mental imagery, I obtained some 

 answers to the following effect : "I depend so much upon mental 

 pictures that I think if I were to lose the power of seeing them 

 I should not be able to think at all." There is an admirable 

 little book published last year or the year before by Binet, " Sur le 

 Raisonnement," which is clear and solid.and deserves careful read- 

 ing two or three times over. It contains pathological cases in 

 which the very contingency of losing the power of seeing mental 

 pictures just alluded to has taken place. The book shows the 

 important part played by visual and motile as well as audile 

 imaginations in the act of reasoning. This and much recent 

 literature on the subject seems wholly unknown to Prof. Max 

 Miiller, who has fallen into the common error of writers not long 

 since, but which I hoped had now become obsolete, of believing 

 that the minds of everyone else are like one's own. His apti- 

 tudes and linguistic pursuits are likely to render him peculiarly 

 dependent on words, and the other literary philosophers whom 

 he quotes in partial confirmation of his extreme views are likely 

 for the same cause, but in a less degree, to have been similarly 

 dependent. Before a just knowledge can be attained concerning 

 any faculty of the human race we must inquire into its distri- 

 bution among all sorts and conditions of men, and on a large 

 scale, and not among those persons alone who belong to a highly 

 specialized literary class. 



I have inquired myself so far as opportunities admitted, and 

 arrived at a result that contradicts the fundamental proposition 

 in the book before us, having ascertained, to my own satisfaction 

 at least, that in a relatively small number of persons true thought 

 is habitually carried on without the use of mental or spoken 

 words. Francis Galton. 



Tabasheer mentioned in Older Botanical Works. 



In recent issues of Nature (pp. 396 and 488) Mr. Thiselton 

 Dyer and Mr. Judd have made two interesting contributions 

 to the knowledge of "tabasheer," and Mr. Tokutaro Ito, and 

 others, have supplied remarkable additional notes (pp. 462, 

 437, &c.). But no one has told us what is to be found about so 

 interesting a substance in the older botanical works. In 

 numerous botanical works of the prse-Linnean period, " tabaxir," 

 as it was called by all authors of that time, is mentioned, and 

 some of them give us very good information about it. 



The first who wrote on tabasheer seems to have been Al-Hussain 

 Abu-Ali Ebn Sina, or Avicenna, as he is generally called by 

 Eastern literary men, a celebrated physician and minister of the 

 Persian Empire, who lived from 980 till 1037, and whose works, 

 written in Arabic, obtained as early as the twelfth century a very 

 great reputation. Avicenna introduced the Persian word 



tabaxir, ^^.iL^jJ?, into the Arabian language; it signifies 



"condensed milk-sap," or as Ray (Raius) translates it (1688) 

 in his " Historia Plantarum," lac lapidescens. Avicenna was 

 not well instructed about the origin of tabasheer, for in lib. ii. 

 cap. 609, he says that it is got "ex radicibus arundinum 

 crematis," and by these words he created an erroneous opinion, 

 which lasted several centuries. For Gerardus of Cremona, 

 who in the twelfth century translated the work of Avicenna 

 into Latin, was induced by this suggestion to identify the 

 Indian tabasheer with the avol6s of the Greeks or the Arabian 

 "tutia," because this remedy was also got by burning the roots 

 of a certain plant, which was probably a Lawsonia.-^ 



This error was corrected by Garcia de Orta, the physician of 

 a viceroy of India, who wrote a book "De Plantis et Aroma- 

 tibus," in Portuguese, which was translated into Latin by De 

 I'Ecluse (Clusius) in his "Exoticarum Libri Decem," and whose 

 information is the best I have found in writers of that time. He 

 says: — "Vocatur autem ab indigenis ' Sacar Mambu,' quasi 

 dicas Saccharum de Mambu, quoniam Indi arundines, sive ramos 

 arboris illud proferentes Mambu vocant. Attamen nunc etiam 

 Tabaxir vocare coeperunt, quoniam eo nomine petitur ab 

 Arabibus, Persis, et Turcis, qui id mercimonii causa ex India 

 in suas regiones exportant. Magno emitur hoc medicamentum 

 pro proventus eius ratione. Eius tanien commune pretium tn 

 Arabia est, ut pari argenti pondere ematur. Arbor in qua 

 gignitur interdum magna est et instar Populi procera : Inter 

 singula internodia liquor quidam dulcis generatur, crassus veluti 



' Afterwards, the signification of the word " spodium," or " spodos," 

 must have totally changed, for Matthiolius and others make it a mixture of 

 metals, probably containing zinc. 



