264 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XVIII. No. 452. 



the door of my laboratory with a pai'cel 

 under his arm and asked if he might have 

 the use of my best compound microscope 

 for a few minutes. I invited him in and 

 he proceeded to unwrap a dead crow which 

 he spread out on a table and with a sharp 

 pocket knife dissected rapidly until he 

 had exposed certain tendons running from 

 the bases of the primary wing feathers to 

 the joints of the wing and thence to the 

 sternum. Then calling attention to these 

 tendons, he asked for his microscope. I 

 suggested that it is not customary to use 

 the compound microscope for that class of 

 work and inquired whether a dissector 

 would not be better adapted to his purpose. 

 To this he assented and forthwith asked 

 for my best dissecting microscope. I sup- 

 plied his wants and left him. Returning 

 in the course of half an hour I found him 

 still examining carefully the whole length 

 of these tendons and their attachments. 

 Looking up he asked if I knew of any 

 force other than that of the atmosphere 

 and the bird's muscular movement which 

 keeps the bird suspended in the air. Upon 

 my replying in the negative, he proceeded 

 to elaborate an electric theory of flight, the 

 sternum being conceived as the generator 

 (he reports that he has occasionally re- 

 ceived slight electric shocks from the breast 

 bone of freshly killed birds), the tendons 

 shown by his dissections being the con- 

 ductors and the entire surface of the 

 spread wing being thus highly charged 

 with electricity. At this point I ventured 

 to inquire how the electric charge acts to 

 keep the bird afloat. This he did not 

 know, but thought it ought to do so. 



Now, here is a bright man, full of ideas 

 and enthusiasm, willing to do much hard 

 labor to work out his conceptions. Why 

 are his researches abortive, their only 

 value being to afford a hearty laugh and a 

 few minutes of interesting diversion in the 



midst of his dai]}- grind to a jaded college 

 professor? Hei-e is valuable energy— for 

 the man is no fool, he is simply untrained 

 — going to waste merely for lack of correla- 

 tion. The man is unable to put his own 

 ideas into relation with the great body of 

 science, and hence he is still in blissful 

 ignorance of the fact that he has succeeded 

 only in making a laughing-stock of himself. 

 The most elementary knowledge of elec- 

 tricity would of course have shown him the 

 absurdity of his proposition. And when 

 we investigators of mature experience 

 publish scientific vagaries or fantastic 

 theories (as we all do sooner or later if we 

 do much really creative work), our failure 

 is traceable in the end to the same defective 

 correlation as is Linton's electric theory 

 of flight. So soon as the facts are all in, 

 such excrescences of scientific fancy are 

 trimmed off automatically. 



If now we attempt to interpret research 

 in terms of the current dynamic concep- 

 tions of consciousness and of things in gen- 

 eral, we may conveniently subdivide the 

 history of any given special investigation 

 somewhat as follows: 



I. We have first the preliminary steps 

 which we may characterize, to borrow a 

 medical term, as the prodromic stages. 

 These include the investigator's whole pre- 

 vious life, the sum-total of his experience 

 so far as it has affected his mode of thought 

 and his fund of ideas. His consciousness 

 may be conceived as for the moment iu 

 a state of relatively stable equilibrium. 

 This equilibrium, however, is not perfect. 

 His fund of knowledge is not complete, 

 nor even symmetrically incomplete, but it 

 is full of gaps. 



To some men these gaps are not signif- 

 icant. Their phenomenal world is com- 

 pletely filled (no matter how contracted 

 their horizon), as one fills out automatically 

 and iinconsciously the blind spot on his 



