Introspection 

 Invention 



SCIENTIFIC SIDE-LIGHTS 



358 



rents coming down from the hills of mem- 

 ory and association to join their issues 

 in our present life. But this sort of looking 

 in upon ourselves and treating ourselves as 

 a subject of natural history is to all men 

 a difficult and to most men an impossible 

 operation. They have neither time for it 

 nor thought for it. The conscious energies 

 of the will are so near us and so ever pres- 

 ent with us that they shut out our view of 

 the forces which lie behind. Yet there are 

 some facts common in the experience of all 

 men which may help us to a conception of 

 the truth. One of these is the fact of mind 

 growing with the growth of years a fact 

 determined by the recollection of childhood, 

 of youth, and of maturity. By comparing 

 ouselves with ourselves at former periods 

 of life by the memory of feelings and of 

 opinions, and of methods of thought which 

 we have outgrown and left behind us, we 

 can detect the action of forces which have 

 told upon our minds traces, in short, of 

 the laws to which they have been subject. 

 Some of these laws have been nothing more 

 than laws of physical growth the concep- 

 tions of the mind undergoing a development 

 consequent on the growth of our material 

 organism. ARGYLL Reign of Law, ch. 6, p. 

 171. (Burt.) 



1748. INTUITIONS NOT EXPLAINED 

 BY EXPERIENCE OF INDIVIDUAL OR 

 OF RACE The Ancient^ Explanation (Job 

 xxxii, 8). It is a familiar truth that some 

 propositions are necessary. We must attach 

 the predicate " equal " to the subject " op- 

 posite sides of a parallelogram " if we think 

 those terms together at all, whereas we need 

 not in any such way attach the predicate 

 " rainy," for example, to the subject " to- 

 morrow." The dubious sort of coupling of 

 terms is universally admitted to be due to 

 " experience " ; the certain sort is ascribed 

 to the " organic structure " of the mind. 

 This structure is in turn supposed by the 

 so-called apriorists to be of transcendental 

 origin, or at any rate not to be explicable 

 by experience; whilst by evolutionary em- 

 piricists it is supposed to be also due to 

 experience, only not to the experience of the 

 individual, but to that of his ancestors as 

 far back as one may please to go. 

 Taking the word " experience " as it is uni- 

 versally understood, the experience of the 

 race can no more account for our necessary 

 or a priori judgments than the experience of 

 the individual can. JAMES Psychology, vol. 

 ii, ch. 28, p. 617. (H. H. & Co., 1899.) 



1749. INUNDATION POSSIBLE 



Subsidence of Land Might Empty Lake Su- 

 perior. If we restrict ourselves to combi- 

 nations of causes at present known it would 

 seem that the two principal sources of ex- 

 traordinary inundations are, first, the escape 

 of the waters of a large lake raised far above 

 the sea; and, secondly, the pouring down of 

 a marine current into lands depressed below 

 the mean level of the ocean. 



As an example of the first of these cases 

 we may take Lake Superior, which is more 

 than 400 geographical miles in length and 

 about 150 in breadth, having an average 

 depth of from 500 to 900 feet. The surface 

 of this vast body of fresh water is no less 

 than 600 feet above the level of the ocean; 

 the lowest part of the barrier which sepa- 

 rates the lake on its southwest side from 

 those streams which flow into the head wa- 

 ters of the Mississippi being about 600 feet 

 high. If, therefore, a series of subsidences 

 should lower any part of this barrier 600 

 feet, any subsequent rending or depression, 

 even of a few yards at a time, would allow 

 the sudden escape of vast floods of water 

 into a hydrographical basin of enormous ex- 

 tent. If the event happened in the dry sea- 

 son, when the ordinary channels of the Mis- 

 sissippi and its tributaries are in a great 

 degree empty, the inundation might not be 

 considerable; but if in the flood season, a 

 region capable of supporting a population 

 of many millions might be suddenly sub- 

 merged. LYELL Principles of Geology, bk. 

 i, ch. 10, p. 156. (A., 1854.) 



175O. INVENTION AMONG SAVAGES 



Devices for Deluding Game Origin of the 

 " Stalking-horse" The Australian hunter 

 takes the wallaby (a small kangaroo) by 

 fastening to a long rod like a fishing-rod a 

 hawk's skin and feathers, making the sham 

 bird hover with its proper cry till it drives 

 the game into a bush where it can be 

 speared. Of devices of stalking with an imi- 

 tated animal one of the most perfect is that 

 of the Dogrib Indians, when a pair of hunt- 

 ers go after reindeer; the foremost carries 

 a reindeer's head, while in the other hand 

 he has a bunch of twigs against which he 

 makes the head rub its horns in a lifelike 

 way, and the two men, walking as the deer's 

 fore and hind legs, get among the herd and 

 bring down the finest. In England, till of 

 late years, fowlers used to hide behind a 

 wooden horse moved along on wheels, and a 

 relic of this survives in the phrase " to make 

 a stalking-horse of one," often now used by 

 people who have no idea what the word 

 meant. TYLOR Anthropology, ch. 9, p. 209. 

 (A., 1899.) 



1751. 



Possibilities of New 



Implement Exhausted Mechanical Prog- 

 ress. I find that in the employment of the 

 curved knife the Eskimo, the Canadian 

 tribes, together with their kindred on the 

 northern boundary of the United States, 

 and, more than all, the North Pacific tribes 

 on both sides of the ocean have exhausted 

 the possibilities of an implement that has 

 been in the hands of some only a century 

 or two. The arts of all these tribes were 

 bettered and not degraded by the curved 

 knife. In every case they were immensely 

 improved. The form of knife with straight, 

 short blade made it possible for the north- 

 ern and western tribes to become better 

 carvers and engravers. Before the possession 



