DISCOVERY 



91 



This ridge is probably a branch of the great mid-Atlantic 

 ridge, along which several volcanic cones rear their 

 crests above the waters of the ocean. 



Of these groups the most interesting is the little 

 Tristan da Cunha group, of which several are well-known 

 and one, Tristan da Cunha, is inhabited. An outlying, 

 seldom-visited member of the group is Diego Alvarez 

 or Gough Island. This island was a Portuguese dis- 

 covery in the days of their great voyages to the East, 

 but when Captain Gough in 173 1 reported an island some 

 degrees east of Diego Alvarez, the new discovery found 

 a place on the charts as Gough Island, and it was long 

 before the identity of the two islands was recognised. 

 Being more or less on the route of sailing ships from the 

 Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, this island was never lost 

 sight of, but throughout the nineteenth century it was 

 visited only by a few sealers and one or two warships 

 from the Cape station. The visit of H.M.S. Royalist in 

 1887 resulted in a rough chart of the island. But practic- 

 ally nothing was known of its structure, fauna and 

 flora, when in 1904 Dr. W. S. Bruce, on his return from 

 the Antarctic in the Scotia, landed an exploring partv. 

 This visit resulted in many discoveries of scientific 

 importance, but the exploration of the island is still 

 incomplete. 1 



To return to the sub- Antarctic islands of the Southern 

 Ocean — for Gough Island is temperate in climate and 

 vegetation — there is one very isolated group that still 

 awaits thorough examination. The South Sandwich 

 group h'ing south-east of South Georgia, between the 

 meridians of 26° and 28" W. and the parallels of 

 56° and 60 "" S., was first sighted in 1775 by Captain 

 Cook. A subsequent visit in 1S20 b}- Captain Bellings- 

 hausen accounts for the many incongruous Russian 

 names on the chart of the islands. The group consists 

 of some eight small volcanic islands, among which are 

 several active volcanoes. In recent years these islands 

 have rarely been visited, except by a few sealers and 

 whalers. Stormy seas and apparent lack of good 

 harbours make the task of exploration difficult. The 

 whalers even avoid these waters. 



It is unhkely that any further islands remain to be 

 discovered in the Southern Ocean. Yet it is not im- 

 possible that east of the South Sandwich group, between 

 it and Bouvet Island, the South Atlantic ridge may 

 have a southern extension on the summit of which some 

 tiny .volcanic island may exist. On her northward 

 voyage along the meridian of 10° \V. in 1904, the Scotia, 

 on one occasion in particular, met great flocks of sea- 

 birds, the presence of which in numbers is a fair indica- 

 tion of the proximity of land, but heavy weather and 

 low visibility in autumn daj's prevented an adequate 

 search. 



1 "Diego Alvarez or Gough Island." R. N. Rudmose Brown. 

 Scottish Geographical Magazine, August 1905. 



Memory, and Its 

 Improvement 



By Robert H. Thouless, M.A. 



Fellow of Corpus Cliristi College, Cambridge ; Lecturer in Psychologi/ at 

 the University 0/ Manchester 



The experimental investigation of the processes of 

 remembering and forgetting is one in which advances 

 have been made fairly continuously during the course 

 of the last thirty years. My main purpose in the 

 present article will be to call attention to the most 

 recent developments, and to the aspects on which 

 attention is focussed at the present day, and in con- 

 nection with which important discoveries may still be 

 made. In order to do this, however, it is necessary for 

 the sake of completeness to mention work on the 

 subject which is no longer recent. These parts of the 

 subject I propose to mention as briefly as possible. 



The person who is not a psychologist is mainly 

 interested in one problem of memory — the question of 

 whether or not the psychologist can tell him of any 

 way by which his memory can be improved. This 

 being the case, he will naturally be disappointed to 

 find that the earliest contribution of empirical psycholo- 

 gists to the subject was the dictum of William James 

 (often repeated since on no good experimental evidence) 

 that his memor}' is not capable of improvement ; that, 

 although he may improve his methods of learning, or 

 other factors incidental to the successful emplojTnent 

 of his memory, his memory itself will remain as it was. 

 The way that James states this fact is as follows : 

 No amount of culture would seem capable of modifying 

 a man's general retenliveness.'^ Later he calls this 

 general retentiveness the faculty for remembering facts 

 at large. The discouragement felt by the person who 

 has spent valuable time and money on systems which 

 advertised that thej^ would improve his memory is 

 only a httle mollified by finding that he is further told 

 that his remembering maj- be made better by improved 

 methods of learning. 



Yet the mere wording of this dogma carries in itself 

 a warning to the psychologist impregnated with the 

 modern point of view. The word faculty implies that 

 we are thinking of the memory as a separate part of 

 the mind with which we remember, just as the hand 

 is a part of the body with which we grasp things, and 

 the leg is a part of the body with which we kick or 

 walk. For a long time psychologists did regard the 

 mind as made up of such separate faculties of memory, 

 imagination, etc., until it was understood that such 

 faculties have no real existence, and are only results 

 of the vicious habit of mind which takes words from 

 * Principles of Psychology, vol. i, p. 664. 



