Febbuaey 16, 1900.] 



SCIENCE. 



273 



for beginning students to prepare. This work 

 was undertaken at my suggestion bjr some stu- 

 dents who were in need of financial assistance 

 in their laudable endeavor to obtain a college 

 education. It was undertaken both for the pur- 

 pose of affording some aid in this way, and also 

 for the purpose of assisting teachers and schools, 

 especially secondary and normal schools, in the 

 supply of material which is often difficult to 

 obtain. 



It should perhaps be stated that neither I, 

 nor the botanical department here, has any 

 official connection with, nor financial interest 

 in, the scheme. At the same time I have taken 

 a lively interest in the work in order to be as- 

 sured that the material and the preparations 

 should be of the first order. The persons who 

 make the preparations are thoroughly familiar 

 with modern methods and have attained a high 

 degree of skill in preparing them. The perma- 

 nent slides showing sexual organs and sexual 

 processes in plants of the different groups are 

 excellent and very beautiful. I am quite sure 

 that those who are familiar with good technique 

 will be quite surprised at the high degree of 

 excellence presented In these slides, and cer- 

 tainly they represent the structures in a strik- 

 ingly accurate manner. They put up in addi- 

 tion to other material, a 'high school set.' 

 Persons or schools desiring further iuformation 

 can obtain a price list by addressing ' The Ithaca 

 Botanical Supply Co.,' Ithaca, N. Y. 



Geo. F. Atkinson. 



DO FISMES REMEMBER? 

 A RECENT paper*by Professor L. Edinger, en- 

 titled ' Haben die Fische ein Gedachtniss, ' 

 is primarily a statement of the conclusions 

 which its author has reached as a result of his 

 questionaire, ' Do Fishes Remember ? ' sent 

 out in 1897. These conclusions are prefaced 

 by some discussion of comparative psychology 

 in general and some account of the sense- 

 powers of fishes. The former is judicious but 

 not new ; the latter is convenient though 

 not complete. Dr. Edinger is inclined to ac- 

 cept the decision that fishes do not hear sounds, 



* Reprinted from Allgemeinen Zeiiung,'M.nnche.a, 

 21 und 23 October, 1899. 



though he seems not to know of the experi- 

 ments of Dr. F. S. Lee, experiments more con- 

 clusive than any he reports. 



Dr. Edinger's question as to memory is not 

 about the existence of certain feelings of a 

 thing as having been experienced before, but 

 about the possibilitj- of permanent associations, 

 of after-effects of experiences. He asks con- 

 cerning the fish nervous system, " Is this appa- 

 ratus capable of in any way preserving impres- 

 sions made upon it ; do there exist after-effects 

 due to previous experiences?" p. 16. Or, in 

 other words, " Can impressions which are new 

 to the animal, gain an influence on its activi- 

 ties ; especially can they preserve this influence 

 for a considerable time?" p. 17. He decides 

 in a rather half-hearted way that they can, on 

 the basis of the evidence obtained from the an- 

 swers to his questionaire and elsewhere. He 

 summarizes this evidence as follows : " (1) The 

 inborn impulse to flee can be lessened by the 

 animal becoming accustomed to impressions 

 which formerly frightened it, but this lameness 

 is lost if new stimuli enter into the experience. 

 The impulse to flee can also appear in the 

 presence of stimuli which have never been 

 present before. Animals become afraid. By 

 habit the sight of the one who feeds them may 

 take the place of the optical or chemical stimu- 

 lus which ordinarily leads to the act of feed- 

 ing " p. 28. 



Dr. Edinger's limitation of fishes' powers of 

 forming associations and being influenced by 

 them more or less permanently, to the single 

 cases of lameness, fear and associations be- 

 tween the feeder and feeding, is misleading. 

 It is no characteristic of fishes' mentality to 

 form such habits rather than others. The 

 prominence of such in the answers to the ques- 

 tionaire is due, not to the mental constitution 

 of the fish, but to the interests of the observers. 

 As a matter of fact the questionaire proceeding 

 seems a very awkward way of answering the 

 question about the permanent effects of novel 

 experiences. One can, as has been shown in the 

 December number of the American Naturalist, 

 get direct evidence of the fact and demonstrate 

 it to a class in the space of five hours. 



Although familiarity with animal psychology 

 proper and a bit more ingenuity might have 



