536 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



lofty ideal of Prof. Huxley : " Education promotes morality and 

 refinement by teaching men to discipline themselves, and by lead- 

 ing them to see that the highest, as it is Vhe only permanent, con- 

 tent is to be attained, not by groveling in the rank and steaming 

 valleys of sense, but by continually striving to those high peaks 

 where, resting in eternal calm, reason discovers the undefined 

 bright ideal of the highest good a cloud by day, a pillar of fire 

 by night." We do not all see the same differentiations of color 

 or appreciate the varieties of taste, smell, or touch, or hear to the 

 same extent the infinite variety of musical expression ; and it is 

 only by cultivating our senses that they can be improved. About 

 a year ago, at the Ida Hospital there were some very offensive 

 smells. Everybody thought there must be something wrong 

 with the drains, until the resident, Mr. Wilks, discovered a hor- 

 ribly offensive fungus. I requested him to bring some specimens 

 to the infirmary weekly board meeting, and I was very much in- 

 terested to hear what the different members would say. The first 

 to examine it said that " it did not smell at all " ; the second 

 that " it was not so bad " ; but all the other members agreed with 

 me that it was horribly offensive and quite accounted for the bad 

 smells. I mention this as an example of differences of opinion 

 about a fact as to whether something was or was not offensive, 

 and to illustrate that we do not all appreciate sensations to the 

 same extent. You are all of you familiar with the curious phe- 

 nomenon of color-blindness ; but there is a much more common 

 and not so easily detected form of blindness which has received 

 the name of " intellectual blindness." We all suffer from it more 

 or less ; some to such an extent as to be almost like unto an an- 

 cient description of some heathen gods, " who have eyes and see 

 not, ears and hear not, noses have they and they smell not." You 

 have all of you been struck with the fact that there are certain 

 things we see eVery day, yet all at once we discover something in 

 them we have never noticed before. I venture to predict that, if 

 I gave all of you a piece of paper and asked you to write down 

 the exact figures as they appear on the face of your watches, not 

 one tenth of you would put them down accurately i. e., of course 

 if you have not already tried the experiment and yet all of you 

 have seen your watch faces several hundreds of times. Or, if you 

 like to make the experiment of getting half a dozen eyewitnesses 

 to describe something they have seen, it is more than probable 

 we should find very marked differences in their descriptions. I 

 think you will agree with me that some of the descriptions in the 

 daily papers bear out this contention. You often have your mis- 

 takes pointed out to you before you are conscious of their exist- 

 ence. You must have very clear ideas of the anatomy and phys- 

 iology of a human being in a healthy condition before you can 



