286 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



reading. As it is, the psychologist who to-day is the greatest authority 

 on the psychology of reading, and who has done more on the subject 

 than any one before him, has merely nibbled at the subject for spare 

 moments, in the midst of an otherwise busy career. One such man 

 alone devoting himself to the subject for a lifetime with suitable facil- 

 ities at command could accomplish wonders. Or, take the subject of 

 arithmetic. Would it not be good economy for the national bureau of 

 education to employ a dozen experts for a dozen years with adequate 

 facilities for experiment and consultation to work out some principles 

 which should determine the elemental contents and fundamental meth- 

 ods of a child's first book in arithmetic? The absence of such prin- 

 ciples is notorious. As the promoters of the automobile, the flying 

 machine and countless other enterprises are now watching the work of 

 the electrical chemist in his struggle to invent a new battery for the 

 storing of electrical energy, so the eyes of the educational world will be 

 upon the man who goes into his laboratory, surrounded by all the aids 

 his science can furnish, in systematic search for ways of conserving 

 the mental energy of the young in school so that a new order of things 

 educational may become possible. A young man of marked ability 

 having to choose to-day between the plan of devoting his life to the 

 intensive study of one practical psychological problem, on the one hand, 

 or the academic career as a teacher, on the other, may well choose the 

 former as the more promising of permanent contributions to science 

 for the good of mankind. As the well-qualified men appear, positions 

 wiU be created for them providing for their bread and butter. 



The third division embraces a great variety of situations in which 

 the consulting psychologist may be employed in determining courses 

 of action, principles of efficiency, principles of economy, principles of 

 validity, etc. Thus in manufacture, there is constant waste of human 

 energy for want of knowledge of underlying mental laws which might 

 be applied for the improvement of the type of mental activity involved ; 

 e. g., for shortening or simplifying movements, for facilitating per- 

 ception and discrimination, for enhancing appreciation, and for in- 

 creasing the effective output of energy. The lawyer has abundant op- 

 portunity for seeking expert information in regard to the laws of 

 human nature. In medicine the present movement in psycho-analysis 

 is an illustration of the opportunity for detailing a trained psychologist 

 to work out the case by teclmical methods which require much special- 

 ized skill. Advertising which now employs very high-grade writers and 

 illustrators appeals to psychology for fundamental principles in regard 

 to the work of attention, feeling, satisfaction, convincing argument, etc. 



The fourth field really belongs to a future generation, for, although 

 we are seeing it full of promise, eugenics, the welfare of mankind, is to 

 us as yet quite unfathomed. The improvement of the race, direction in 



