160 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 
sand dollars being needed for the repair of disjointed gas pipes in Chi- 
cago and its suburbs. Goods were thrown from the shelves in some 
stores. In the watch works in Elgin some delicate instruments were 
thrown out of gear, and in a printer’s office in Dubuque some type, 
locked in a form, was pied. A kitten was thrown across a room. 
There was one class of accidents, some serious and others comical, 
which could not have been foreseen as the results of an earthquake. 
These involve some trigger-like arrangements. Falling stoves and dis- 
jointed stove flues caused several fires in Aurora and Chicago. In 
Waukegan the shock disarranged the bins in a feed store, and some of 
the grain was let out through a crack between the boards. The leg of a 
piano was loosened and fell in a school in Oak Park. The whole 
instrument was in this way upset and tumbled down on the floor, and 
the accompanying crash and noise naturally frightened the children. 
Many reports describe the mental state and the behavior of people 
on experiencing the unusual sensation of the earthquake. In the epi- 
central tracts some were terrified, many left, or fled or rushed from 
their homes, or from buildings where they were working. There were 
several small panics among laborers and among employees in factories. 
People were alarmed and excited and ran on the streets. Some schools 
were dismissed for the day and instruction was interrupted in two uni- 
versity classes. From farther out in the disturbed region some papers 
state that the people in the upper stories of some high buildings were 
frightened, and from still further out reports mention that people 
were surprised or merely that they perceived the physical sensation, 
evidently unattended by any emotion. 
The tendency of the human mind to make inferences and draw 
conclusions is pointedly illustrated by many of the reports. In cases 
where the earthquake was not recognized, the disturbance noted was 
nevertheless invariably ascribed to some cause, more or less remote, but 
suggested through the bias of previous experience. Many people 
thought the jar they felt was due to an explosion or a blast in some 
quarry, and others thought it was due to the moving of some heavy ob- 
ject in the building they occupied. A janitor in a school building 
thought that a man engaged to repair the flag pole had fallen on the 
roof. A grocer who had piled up some sacks of flour in the second 
story, went up to see if these had fallen down. People living near car 
lines and railroads referred the commotion to passing cars or trains. 
Residents in the cities were reminded of the passing of heavy vehicles. 
Two unsophisticated children jumped out of a bed that shook, ran 
crying to their mother and reported that the bed was falling to pieces. 
A young lady stenographer in Chicago, more versed in the ways of the 
world, felt her chair rocking and promptly rebuked a supposed offender 
at her back with the command: “ You stop that.” 
Projected forward instead of backward, reasoning results in the 
