96 PSYCHOLOGY. 



age, not having time to see more than that it is a bird of such a size 

 and. color, he immediately supplies by inference the other qualities of a 

 woodcock, and is afterwards disgusted to find that he has shot a thrush. 

 I have done so myself, and could hardly believe that the thrush was the 

 bird I had fired at, so complete was my mental supplement to my visual 

 perception. " * 



As with game, so with enemies, ghosts, and the like. 

 Anyone w^aiting in a dark place and expecting or fearing 

 strongly a certain object will interpret any abrupt sensa- 

 tion to mean that object's presence. The boy playing ' I 

 spy,' the criminal skulking from his pursuers, the supersti- 

 tious person hurrying through the woods or past the church- 

 yard at midnight, the man lost in the woods, the girl who 

 tremulously has made an evening appointment with her 

 swain, all are subject to illusions of sight and sound which 

 make their hearts beat till they are dispelled. Twenty 

 times a day the lover, perambulating the streets with his 

 preoccupied fancy, will think he perceives his idol's bonnet 

 before him. 



The Proof-reader^ s Illusion. I remember one night in 

 Boston, whilst waiting for a ' Mount Auburn ' car to bring 

 me to Cambiidge, reading most distinctly that name ujjon 

 the signboard of a car on wh^cli (as I afterwards learned) 

 ' North Avenue ' was painted. The illusion was so vivid 

 that I could hardly believe my eyes had deceived me. All 

 reading is more or less performed in this way. 



" Practised novel- or newspaper-readers could not possibly get on so 

 fast if they had to see accurately every single letter of every word in 

 order to perceive the words. More than half of the words come out of 

 their mind, and hardly half from the printed page. Were this not so, 

 did we perceive each letter by itself, typographic errors in well-known 

 words would never be overlooked. Children, whose ideas are not yet 

 ready enough to perceive words at a glance, read them wroug if they 

 are printed wrong, that is, right according to the way of printing. In 

 a fortign language, although it may be printed with the same letters, 

 we read by so much the more slowly as we do not understand, or are 

 unable promptly to perceive the words. But we notice misprints all the 

 more readily. For this reason Latin and Greek and, still better, 

 Hebrew works are more correctly printed, because the proofs are better 

 corrected, than in German works. Of two friends of mine, one knew 

 much Hebrew, the other little ; the latter, however, gave instruction in 



* Romanes, Mental Evolution in Animals, d. 334.. 



