i88i.] 
The Transfer of Sensation. 
541 
men become wonderfully acute in their senses of hearing 
and feeling has been known for thousands of years. Dr. 
Davey quotes, from the “ Twenty-first Report of the Direc- 
tors of the Hartford Asylum,” the case of a girl, named 
Julia Brace, who had lost both sight and hearing, and whose 
sense of smell became wonderfully acute. “ She has been 
frequently known to seledl her own clothes from a mass of 
dresses belonging to 140 persons. Her manner is to examine 
each article by feeling, but to decide upon it by the sense of 
smell ; and in regard to her own things she is never mis- 
taken. She has been frequently known to discriminate, 
merely by smelling them, the recently-washed stockings of 
the boys from those of the girls at the asylum.” Having 
such fadts before us, we need, be it parenthetically remarked, 
wonder little that an ant should distinguish strangers of the 
same species from its own fellow-citizens. Nor need we feel 
surprised that the ichneumon should become aware of the 
presence of a larva deeply buried in perfectly opaque 
matter. 
But the case which Dr. Davey has to describe is of a much 
more remarkable character. It is not the mere increase of 
the acuteness of one special sense in compensation for the loss 
of others. The delicate sense of smell possessed by Julia 
Brace enabled her to distinguish objedts by recognising 
minute shades of odour which for ordinary human beings 
are non-existent. But it did not undertake the diredt func- 
tions of the eye or the ear. It did not, e.g., enable her to 
read. What, however, is to be said when we find a blind 
and deaf woman examining a pidture or a photograph with 
the fingers of the right hand, and then being able to give a 
description — often full and detailed — of its colouring and the 
several objedts thereon ? What must we think that she is 
communicating with “ by writing with the finger on her face, 
which is so sensitive that it receives and transmits to the 
brain the slightest movements of the finger, whether moved 
up or down, across, or in any diredtion ?” 
The first comment made in many quarters will be a 
lamentation about Spiritualism, jugglery, dominant ideas, 
and the like. On this hand let us first hear Dr. Davey 
describe his own position : — “ I shall treat the subjedt in 
hand from a physiological stand-point. Of matters super- 
natural or forces outside Nature I know nothing. If any- 
one here expedts me to discourse or speculate on the 
immaterial, the metaphysical, he will be disappointed : for 
this single and sufficient reason, I believe in nothing of the 
kind. As a materialist I hold that to degrade matter as is 
