NOTES ON A FEW POPULAR FALLACIES AND 

 COMMON ERRORS 



]HEN a fallacy or an error becomes embodied in a 

 proverb or woven into the texture of a language, 

 its vitality and power of diffusion seem almost 

 inexhaustible. It will require a long course of 

 education to destroy the force of the proverb, " Lightning 

 never strikes twice in the same place," or to eradicate 

 from the popular mind the idea that black lead is related 

 to the metal lead. Nevertheless the time will surely come 

 when such crude notions will be abandoned by even the 

 least educated. Of course there will always be errors and 

 mistakes which will have a vogue amongst the unthinking, 

 but such gross fables as were accepted by our forefathers 

 are now entirely abandoned and no one can be found who 

 now believes in the vampire, the phoenix, the salamander, 

 the centaur, or any of the other fabulous products of the 

 human imagination. But even down to the time of 

 Shakespeare it was generally held that such creatures did 

 exist or might have existed, the most elementary principles 

 of biology not being generally known and even not yet 

 discovered. Shakespeare's works . are full of erroneous 

 statements in regard to matters of natural history, and it 

 is not long since a writer for the press published an elabo- 

 rate article accusing him of ignorance or faking, the truth 

 of the matter being that Shakespeare took his natural 

 history from those works which in his time were considered 

 standard authorities, just as the writer of the article in ques- 



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