OCTOBEE 30, 1896.] 



SCIENCE. 



643 



ered the influence due mainly to weakness 

 of will and to dependence on others, the 

 subjects thus needing some one to decide 

 for them. 



Prof. Th. Lipps (Munich), the Yice- 

 President, considered the subject ' The idea 

 of the unconscious in psychology.' For a 

 true science of the mind the speaker found 

 it was necessary to consider the uncon- 

 scious, and he held that a psychology 

 which took account only of our conscious 

 experiences would be an ' Unding.' 



The following papers were also announced 

 for the general sessions, but were not read : 

 G. Stanley Hall (Worcester, Mass.), 'A 

 Genetic Study of Primitive Emotions;' 

 G. F. Stout (Cambridge, Eng.), ' Unana- 

 lyzed Individuality as a Dominant Category 

 in Savage Thought;' F. W. H. Myers 

 (Cambridge, Eng.), ' The Psychology of 

 Genius;' W. von Tschisch (Dorpat,Kussia), 

 'Memory for Sense Perceptions; A. Binet 

 (Paris), 'Individual Psychology.' 



The following are short accounts of some 

 of the papers read at the sectional sessions: 



SECTION I. 



Dr. A. Tokarsky (Moscow) considered 

 the question of the shortest time of a sim- 

 ple reaction. He excluded only those 

 experiments as premature which either 

 actually preceded or coincided with the 

 stimulus, and found then that the shortest 

 reactions were from .005 to .01 second. 



Prof. H. Ebbinghaus (Breslau), in his 

 communication on the psycho-physical 

 method of right and wrong cases, pointed 

 out some errors in the use of the method 

 and discussed the relation it bore to the 

 method of mean error. 



Prof. O. Kiilpe (Wiirzburg) communi- 

 cated some preliminary results he had ob- 

 tained on the influence of the attention on 

 the intensity (brightness) of a sensation. 

 He had experimented with visual stimuli 

 and found in the diversion of attention by 



convergence and accommodation that one 

 observer made an under- valuation, while 

 two others over- valued the intensity. The 

 paper led to a discussion between Miinster- 

 berg, Ebbinghaus, Stumpf, Exner, Lipps 

 and the reader of the paper. 



Prof. G. Martins (Bonn) announced some 

 results on the influence of the intensity of 

 light on the brightness of the color sensa- 

 tion. His experiments showed that the 

 brightness of the color sensation bears a 

 functional relation to the objective intensity 

 of the light. Eed, orange, yellow and 

 purple decreased steadily as the intensity 

 decreased; the other colors increased up to 

 the value found by the method of minimum 

 intensity. 



"W. S. Wads worth (Philadelphia) gave 

 an account of some experiments made with 

 persons of defective color vision. He ex- 

 hibited many charts showing effects of edu- 

 cation, association, sex, temperament, etc. 

 He referred to the difficulties experienced 

 in making comparisons with results of 

 previous investigators and, to obviate this 

 in the future, suggested the appointment of 

 an international committee to consider and 

 decide upon a standard series of colors. 



Dr. G. M. Stratton (Berkeley, Cal.) de- 

 scribed some preliminary experiments he 

 had made on ' vision without inversion of 

 the retinal image.' The aim of the work 

 was to test the assertions, made by the ex- 

 ponents of the ' projection ' and of the ' eye 

 movement ' theories of upright vision, that 

 the inversion of the retinal image is neces- 

 sary for upright vision. The experiments 

 were made using only one eye, but they 

 showed a rapid reharmonizing of tactual and 

 visual localization. The speaker concluded, 

 therefore, that the experiment proved that 

 the perception of the field as ' upright ' is not 

 dependent on the inversion of the retinal 

 image. 



Prof. R. Taverni (Catania, Sardinia) 

 communicated some results on ' States in 



