May 9, 1902 ] 



SCIENCE. 



743 



when once he had noticed the characteristic 

 difference of the gait in the two sexes. Like- 

 wise Mr. Rivers' Papuans, though they pos- 

 sessed a superior vision, yet detected the pres- 

 ence of a steamer in a neighboring harbor 

 mainly by knowing what to look for at so great 

 a distance. A few supplementary results may 

 add interest to this general conclusion. It ap- 

 pears that the women had as good vision as 

 the men, that decline of vision seemed to set 

 in at an earlier age among the Torres Strait 

 natives (aet. 35) than among Europeans (set. 

 50), and that they, furthermore, did not ex- 

 hibit the rapid improvement with a given test 

 which is a common observation among Euro- 

 peans. Myopia was distinctly less common 

 than among Europeans, and this alone would 

 account for an average superiority of visual 

 acuteness. It appeared, too, that the natives 

 could see more clearly with feeble illumina- 

 tion and were able to distinguish the faint 

 gray rings produced by slight black patches on 

 a rotating white disc (Masson's discs) better 

 than Europeans. 



Mr. Rivers' examinations of the color sense 

 were quite extensive and included some very 

 interesting notes on the color vocabulary in 

 the several native languages. The relative 

 absence of the typical form of color blindness 

 (confusion of reds with greens) among the 

 people examined corroborates the result found 

 by others, that color blindness of this tj'pe is 

 distinctly more prevalent among European 

 peoples. Mr. Rivers gives strong reasons fo^- 

 concluding that his subjects exhibited a cer- 

 tain degree of insensitiveness to blue (and 

 possibly green) as compared with Europeans. 

 The result, in a measure, strengthens Glad- 

 stone's contention of the relatively late intro- 

 duction of blue in the color evolution of the 

 race, but it gives that conclusion a different 

 and far more rational setting. A third group 

 of visual experiments related to the space 

 perceptions and the sensitiveness to certain 

 common illusions of length and direction 

 comparisons. Here a brief resume is hardly 

 possible, but suggestions of interest are the 

 following: the well-known Mueller-Lyer illu- 

 sion (of the apparent greater leng-th of a line 

 having divergent pairs of oblique lines at its 



extremities, like the feathering of an arrow, 

 above an equal line with convergent oblique 

 terminations) is distinctly less marked to the 

 Torres Strait natives than to Europeans; the 

 former are relatively less variable among 

 themselves in judgments of this type than a 

 comparable group of Europeans ; several other 

 illusions involving interpretative factors were 

 less marked than they would be to Europeans, 

 while a few that depended upon the phys- 

 iological shortcomings of the eye seemed on 

 the whole more obvious than to uninstructed 

 Europeans. 



Many of these suggestions offer tangible 

 points of corroboration or the opposite, of gen- 

 eral notions as to the effect of civilization 

 upon the sensory endowment of man. Mr. 

 Rivers throws out the pertinent thought that a 

 superiority of minute sensory observation may 

 well be the characteristic of the more primi- 

 tive mind, and that this form of excellence 

 may be prejudicial to the more general use 

 of the senses as the servants of the judgment 

 and associative interpretation upon which 

 education depends. He suggests that the less 

 marked sensitiveness of his subjects to certain 

 illusions may be an evidence of this, since 

 they see only the parts and not the whole; and 

 it is the conception of the geometric figures as 

 a whole that brings in the contrast upon which 

 the illusion depends. "If too much energy 

 is expended on the sensory foundations, it is 

 natural that the intellectual superstructure 

 should suffer. It seems possible that the over- 

 development of the sensory side of the mental 

 life may help to account for another character- 

 istic of the savage mind. There is, I thinkj 

 little doubt that the uncivilized man does not 

 take the same jesthetic interest in nature that 

 is found among civilized peoples." And this, 

 according to Ranke, is due to the savage ab- 

 sorption in the useful details of nature and 

 his consequent inability to see the larger rela- 

 tions. "Ranke's experience is strongly in 

 favor of the view that the predominant atten- 

 tion of the savage to concrete things around 

 him may act as an obstacle to higher mental 

 development." 



We are as yet far from an adequate view of 

 the essential transformation of the psycholog- 



