558 The American Naturalist. [June, 
brance of them, caused an involuntary imitation of the direction of 
the moving stimuli, not only by the hands, but also by the whole body ; 
this tendency manifested itself in a distinctly observable swaying of 
the head. As to the second point, the investigation brought out the 
general fact that “children are governed by and subject to the same 
laws as adults, but to a less extent.” Individual variations were wider 
in them than in adults. No differences were found in children due to 
age or sex, 
These experiments seem to substantiate the views of Féré and Leh- 
mann, while they disagree with those of Jastrow, who reported a ten- 
dency of the hands to move toward stationary objects whenever the 
attention was directed towards their locality. 
Contraction of the Field of Vision.—lIt has been questioned 
for sometime whether the contraction of the field of vision after repeated 
tests of the periphery (attributed to fatigue) is limited strictly to patho- 
logical cases. Of recent years it has been generally assumed that this 
phenomenon appears frequently in normal life as well, and in conse- 
quence it has lost much of its former value as a psychiatrical symptom. 
Dr. Erdmann Mueller, however, has recently published? the results of 
an investigation undertaken upon 102 normal subjects which show the 
contrary to be true. The tests were made without a perimeter, the ob- 
ject of vision being a small, white ivory ball of the size of a cherry- 
pit, which was fixed to a thin, translucent piece of fish-bone. 
Out of the entire number of subjects tested, but two showed any 
unusual contraction of the visual field. In three separate trials 
apiece, with each eye, these two subjects showed a contraction varying 
from 10° to 30° in the course of a single trial, but each showed no 
contraction whatever in one of the tests. The subjects in question 
were found to be suffering from slight neurasthenia, but exhibited no 
severe neurotic symptoms whatever. Of the remaining 100 subjects, 
three showed a contraction of 5°, and thirty a contraction of from 2—- 
4° only; but in seventeen of these cases a contraction of the field on 
one side was accompanied by a widening on the other, so that the ap- 
parent change may easily have been due toa slight shifting of the 
position of the head during the progress of the experiment. The other 
sixty-seven subjects showed a contraction of 1° or less, which was be- 
low the threshold of experimental precision. 
As a result of these tests, Dr. Mueller concludes that the contraction 
occurs among healthy persons, if at all, only in the very slightest de- 
3 Arch. f. Psychiat. u. Nervenkr., 1896, XXIX, 225-230. 
