FUNCTIONS AND VALUE OF THE SYLLOGISM. 253 



ground, is able at once to give the necessary orders 

 for a skilful arrangement of his troops ; though if he 

 has received little theoretical instruction, and has 

 seldom been called upon to answer to other people 

 for his conduct, he may never have had in his mind 

 a single general theorem respecting the relation 

 between ground and array. But his experience of 

 encampments, under circumstances more or less 

 similar, has left a number of vivid, unexpressed, un- 

 generalized analogies in his mind, the most appro- 

 priate of which, instantly suggesting itself, determines 

 him to a judicious arrangement. 



The skill of an uneducated person in the use of 

 weapons, or of tools, is of a precisely similar nature. 

 The savage who executes unerringly the exact throw 

 which brings down his game, or his enemy, in the 

 manner most suited to his purpose, under the opera- 

 tion of all the conditions necessarily involved, the 

 weight and form of the weapon, the direction and 

 distance of the object, the action of the wind, &c., 

 owes this power to a long series of previous experi- 

 ments, the results of which he certainly never framed 

 into any verbal theorems or rules. It is the same in 

 all extraordinary manual dexterity. Not long ago a 

 Scotch manufacturer procured from England, at a 

 high rate of wages, a working dyer, famous for pro- 

 ducing very fine colours, with the view of teaching 

 to his other workmen the same skill. The workman 

 came ; but his mode of proportioning the ingredients, 

 in which lay the secret of the effects he produced, was 

 by taking them up in handfuls, while the common 

 method was to weigh them. The manufacturer sought 

 to make him turn his handling system into an equiva- 

 lent weighing system, that the general principle of 

 his peculiar mode of proceeding might be ascertained. 



