pencil on the desk and you will discover that your nerves have been extended to 

 its tip. From the nerves extended in the axeman's blade, to the feel of a 

 helmsman for his ship, and to the radio-chemist's servo-manipulation, this 

 curiously inconspicuous sense has extended man's physical accomplishments. 



As to the mode of presentation of information to the mind, we are so 

 strongly conscious of our visual sense that a presentation to our sight, regard- 

 less of form, often is unquestioningly accepted as the ultimate completion of an 

 instrument linkage. "Seeing is believing" is a mere statement of the reliance 

 that man places on his sight for we accept the evidence of our sight over the evi- 

 dence of all of our other senses. Ordinarily we will accept the evidence of any 

 other sense to the point where it conflicts with our sense of sight. The con- 

 centration upon purely collecting devices in a young science like oceanography, 

 partly is an expression of the amount of knowledge which can be drawn through 

 visual inspection of samples. Yet the sense of sight, with the bountiful infor- 

 mation presented to it, interprets only part of that information, while the ear, 

 with a comparative paucity of information analyzes it in much greater detail. I 

 like to think of this as a development from the requirements of recognition. To 

 primitive man the image of a lion ordinarily was sufficient for recognition and 

 c'blor was almost redundant but a sense of hearing which conveyed only the pure 

 mean tone of a lion's roar would be inadequate, indeed. And hence we have 

 developed the incredible capacity which allows a musician to recognize instantly 

 a symphonic passage, to identify positively the conductor, and very likely to rec- 

 ognized the makes of some of the instruments. If our color sense had only 

 part of this frequency resolution, a diffraction grating would be a mere labora- 

 tory curiosity instead of the bottleneck in the study of atomic states. Or if we 

 possessed in vision the time sequence memory that in hearing allows the ordi- 

 nary individual to recall several hundred thousand notes in time sequence and 

 duration, the committing to memory of the soundings, temperatures and salini- 

 ties on an expedition would be commonplace. As oscilloscope presentation is 

 valuable, yet in many cases we could receive more information nnore rapidly 

 with more understanding and better memory if we heard it. These are impor- 

 tant considerations in the early exploration phases when we are dealing with de- 

 tails rather than concepts. 



I belabor this point somewhat because of a conspicuous tendency on the 

 part of instrument designers to consider that the presentation to the sight is the 

 final goal without regard to the stage of the investigation, possibilities of the oth- 

 er senses and, particularly, without regard to the peculiar limitations of our 

 visual sense. 



We must not overlook such facts as that a demanding test of a wake de- 

 tector is whether or not a man can smell diesel fumes at the site of suspected 

 contact. I do not doubt that if we could add one stage of amplification to our 

 olfactory sense we could track a snorkeling submarine around the world or lo- 

 cate regions of high plankton productivity from an aeroplane fifty miles down- 

 wind. 



It commonly is believed that our visual sense contains our only quantita- 

 tive power. Actually this is untrue, and the visual sense possesses only the 

 power that other senses possess, an ability to make comparison with a standard. 

 However, these standards are so simple and so common (scales on a thermo- 

 meter, rules, divisions on a chart) that we accept them as an inherent capacity 

 of our visual image. Actually the unique capacity of our vision is the power of 

 interpolation, for on any grid we can mentally superimpose a finer grid for ac- 

 curate interpolation. This is a power that other senses have only to a slight 

 degree. The degree of this power greatly affects the number of standards re- 



