520 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



electric eel also inhabits Venezuelan waters. Certain streams of 

 the Apure district are carefully avoided by bathers, less through 

 fear of the alligators than of these eels and other electric crea- 

 tures, and of the ferocious fishes called caribs, after the once- 

 dreaded tribe of cannibals. The last so abound that some creeks 

 are said to contain " more caribs than water." 



Noxious creatures are not wanting on land. Many snakes 

 glide through the herbage, especially on the plains, among them 

 being the anaconda, the boa constrictor, and the striped rattle- 

 snake. The swampy islands of the Orinoco delta swarm with 

 mosquitoes, and at the Maipures rapids, where " the wind never 

 blows/' the air sometimes seems to be full of them. Locusts are 

 often a great plague to the peasants. 



Venezuela is a country of great resources, with some obstacles 

 in the way of utilizing them. Not all of its known useful min- 

 erals have been mentioned here, and a thorough geological sur- 

 vey, which the country has never had, would doubtless largely 

 extend the list. Nor are its forest products by any means com- 

 pletely known. The future prosperity of the land requires self- 

 control and energy on the part of its citizens, with regulations to 

 induce the foreigners who go there to become Venezuelans instead 

 of withdrawing a portion of its wealth to be enjoyed after return- 

 ing whence they came. 



SUGGESTIBILITY, AUTOMATISM, AND KINDRED 

 PHENOMENA. 



BY PROF. WILLIAM ROMAINE NEW BOLD. 

 III. DISORDINATION AND INCOORDINATION. 



IN my two former papers I have sketched the conception of any 

 state of consciousness as a coordination of mental elements 

 which might conceivably exist independently, and have en- 

 deavored to bring it into relation with our conception of the 

 physical basis of consciousness as a similarly coordinated sys- 

 tem of forces to certain elements of which the various discern- 

 ible elements of consciousness in some sense correspond ; and I 

 have drawn from this fundamental conception two inferences; 

 (1) That we must think and reason about the mental thing as we 

 would about its physical basis ; we must therefore ascribe to it 

 dynamic properties which will in the long run be found cor- 

 respondent to the laws of brain-functioning. (2) It is con- 

 ceivable that a cortical process might exist without coalescing 

 with any such system as underlies a personal consciousness, and 

 that a mental state might exist in connection with the process out- 



