RECORDS. 673 



the fact of incompetency to do certain mental work or a feeling 

 of incompetency which parallels the fact or the feeling or feel- 

 ings denoted by our common expressions " mentally tired," 

 " mentally exhausted." Among the conclusions to which the 

 experiments have lead are the following: first, that the fact of 

 incompetency is not what it has been supposed to be ; second, 

 that there is no pure feeling of incompetency which parallels it 

 and is its sign, that consequently the mental states ordinarily de- 

 signated by the phrases mentioned are not states made up of 

 such a feeling of incompetency, but are very complex affairs ; 

 and third, that these mental states are in no sense parallels or 

 measures of the decrease in ability to do mental work. The ex- 

 periments show no decrease in amount, speed or accuracy of 

 work in the evenings of days of hard mental work over morn- 

 ings or in periods immediately following prolonged mental work 

 over periods preceding it. 



Dr. Farrand's paper was a contribution to the solution of the 

 problem of the evolution of decorative art, and particularly of the 

 question of development of geometric patterns from realistic por- 

 trayals of natural objects. Attention was confined to the basketiy 

 designs of the Salish Indians of British Columbia and western 

 Washington, which exhibit certain peculiarities marking them off 

 rather sharply from the designs used by neighboring stocks. It 

 was shown that while the adjacent tribes in the northwest make use 

 almost exclusively of animal designs, and their conventionalism 

 is of a unique nature and not geometric, the tendency of the 

 SaHsh decorations, on the other hand, is entirely in the direction 

 of extreme geometric conventionalization and the use of animal 

 motives is not predominant. The question of variants and of 

 convergent evolution in designs were discussed and the points 

 made were illustrated by the exhibition of a large number of 

 designs taken from the baskets collected by the Jesup North 

 Pacific Expedition from the region under discussion. 



Dr. Judd's paper referred to the recent psychological discus- 

 sions which have emphasized the importance of movement and 

 motor nervous processes as conditions of consciousness. It 

 was pointed out that just as psychology must look for the con- 



