represent the essential elements of a nervous system and which will react in the same way. Superficially the likeness of the device to a nervous system is not obvious but there are certain principles of action common to both. Thirdly is given a demonstration of operations performed by the apparatus simulating inhibition, learning, habit-forming, etc. The argument shows that a comparatively weak nervous channel may become a comparatively strong one if it be provided with two sensory endings and provided that outside occurrences shall cause the two endings to be excited in succession from time to time. In due course the originally weak channel will prevail over the originally strong channel and will control the muscular response. It is shown that converging channels will account for inhibition and diverging channels for association of ideas. The importance of counter signals or nervous impulses brought about by certain movements is pointed out. A form of satisfaction which is the antithesis of inhibition is explained by the effect of counter signals upon channel development. The apparatus described is a hydraulic regulating system. The important parts are (1) a transmitter or triple slide valve with a timing attachment; (2) a measuring or balancing device governing a hydraulic cylinder or motor; (3) a system of key rods connected so that each key rod controls one or more transmitters and on the other hand each transmitter is controlled by one or more key rods. What a Student of Elementary Psychology Should be Taught Concerning the Functions of the Nervous System. G. V. N. DEARBORN, Tufts College Medical School. By request, the writer ventures the following suggestions as to the aspect of the nervous system essential at first to a student of psychology. He should be taught: (1) Systematically and carefully the enormous complexity of the neuro-musculo-glandular mechanism and process, homologous to the indescribably complex mental procedure. (2) The utter and misleading inadequacy of known central and axial localization to explain the actually experienced certainties of complexity, mental or bodily. (3) That the sole function of the nervous system is to conduct influences as the means of coördination and integration. (4) That the nervous system functionally viewed is a fabric, with separate pathways only in an anatomic sense. (5) That, every moment of the mental process being "will," "feeling," and "intelligence" mixed, there is to be sought a more or less closely corresponding breadth in the nervous coördinations. (6) The unified duality in the nervous system of the vegetative (phylenic, nutritional, habitual, actuating, spino-sympathetic, subconscious) and the personal (ontogenic, new, inhibitory, cortical, conscious). (7) The hierarchy of nervous circuits (arbitrarily six, for example), each including more or less those beneath or within it, and influencing more or less those above it. (8) The universality, both in time and space, of the cenesthetic influences coming into the central nervous system from the universally tonic or moving body, these waves of exciting energy constituting the reservoir from which the effective nervous energy is drawn, actuating and inhibitory. (9) That the greater part of the neural fabric is continually determining and serving the subconscious personality as an unique set of purposes. (10) That the nature of the nervous energy is still unknown, but that, whatever its variety, it (and not "traces" supposed to be "graven" in the material of the great cortex, 85 per cent. water) constitutes, in the form of kinetic strains, the chief immediate "physical basis" of memory, habit, meaning, and the rest. (11) All possible really known details concerning the structure and the functions of the nervous system, and perhaps much more of the physiology of the receptors and the effectors than the majority of students ever learn. (12) Psychologic students should be taught that it is better to be reasonably sure of a few of the basal general principles of the action of the neuro-musculo-glandular mechanism than to pretend an understanding in no way to be had from a relatively few isolated and uncertain facts of neural structure. Left-handedness and Right-handedness in Infancy. MAX Meyer, University of Missouri. The thesis of this paper is that left-handedness in infancy is a necessary accompaniment, in individual endowment, of righthandedness in adult life. The left-handedness of infancy is commonly enough observed, but it is nevertheless quite generally disbelieved. If a person who in adult life is known beyond doubt to be right-handed is reported by observers of his infancy to have been left-handed, then-so we reason-those observers must necessarily have been in error, must have been unreliable; or the prevailing activity of the left hand, if accurately observed, must have been due to fortuitous circumstances forcing its use. This reasoning is not justifiable. Here is an example of this erroneous interpretation. A classical example, it might be called. "In taking her out to her cab," Mrs. Helen Thompson Woolley says in the PsYCHOL. REV., 1910, "the nurse always carried her on the left arm, leaving the child's left hand free, and as a result, she learned to wave Bye-Bye with the left hand. ... By fifteen months, she had ceased using the left hand." If our ancestral inheritance could be so easily modified as Mrs. Woolley supposes, what an incentive this would be to enthusiastic educators! I stated the fact of general left-handedness in infancy in my book on Human Behavior in 1911. So far as I know it has never been clearly recognized before. I have also indicated there a possible explanation. If the left cerebral hemisphere, which serves such complex functions as speech, reaches maturity, so to speak, only during the second year, it appears plausible to assume that during the first months of life hand movements are predominantly controlled by the right hemisphere which serves simpler functions and probably matures at an earlier time. General left-handedness in infancy would be the consequence as naturally as general right-handedness in adult life. If the thesis is true, such attempts as that of Mr. H. C. Stevens (PSYCHOL. REV., 1908) to explain right-handedness by regarding it as determined by an hypothetical superiority of histological equipment of the left halves of the retinæ must fail, unless the histological equipment of the halves of the retine is supposed to change places from the first to the second year. The superiority of the sense of sight on the right half of the field of vision, which Mr. Stevens has proved, is not the cause, but rather the effect of right-handedness, unless both are to be regarded as the effects of a common cause. Families of American Men of Science. J. MCKEEN CATTELL, Columbia University. Statistics were presented in regard to the families of about a thousand of the leading men of science of the United States. Twelve per cent. are foreign born, 12 per cent. are native born of foreign parents and 7 per cent. have one foreign parent. Forty-three per cent. of the fathers belong to the professional classes, 21 per cent. to the agricultural classes, and 36 per cent. to the manufacturing and business classes. Clergymen have the best record. The fathers were married at the average age of 26.6 years, they were on the average 35 years old at the time of the birth of their sons, and died at the average age of 70.6 years. Families of the class from which scientific men come had about 3.25 children; married scientific men whose families are complete have on the average 2.2 children. The percentage of deaths of children under five years is for the parents 14.8 and for the scientific men 7.5. The figures show a slight inheritance of fertility and a slight selective death rate against the larger families, but the correlations are very low. Mothers of large families live longer than mothers of small families. Scientific men coming from large or small families and those having relatively large or small families are in rank of about average standing, as are those unmarried. The first-born child has the best chance to become a scientific man. There are many cases in which scientific men are interrelated, and a large percentage of scientific men have relatives of distinction. A large mass of data concerning these and other factors was presented on tables. The discussion of the paper is concerned largely with the causes and effects of decreasing birth rates and death rates and on the extent to which scientific performance is determined by heredity or opportunity. The Separate Origins of Magic and of Religion. JAMES H. LEUBA, Bryn Mawr College. Three types of behavior have been developed by man: 1. The Mechanical Behavior is the method of dealing with things. It implies a quantitative relation between cause and effect. 2. The Anthropopathic Behavior includes (a) the common relations of men and animals with each other, and (b) those of men with unseen beings. When these beings are gods, we have religion. The desired results depend upon an agent endowed with intelligence, and feeling. 3. The Magical or Coercitive Mode of Behavior, in which neither quantitative nor anthropopathic relations are involved. But magic may be used upon a personal agent. In that case the agent is neither prayed to, nor conciliated by offerings, but coerced. Most of the varieties of magic may be accounted for by the following principles of explanation: (a) Playful prohibitions. "If you do this," say our children, "that will happen to you." The "this" and "that" have usually no logical connection. Playful prohibitions may be taken in earnest and acquire a magical significance. (b) Threats of untoward happenings made for the purpose of preserving things vital to the life and prosperity of the tribe. (c) The deliberate treatment of certain situations according to magical principles, for instance, that like produces like. This source of magic is, of course, relatively a late one, since it presupposes that a principle of magical procedure has been disengaged from magical practices. With regard to the origin of science, the author maintains, against Frazer, that the ancestor of science is not the magical but the mechanical behavior. The essential presupposition of science is that definite and constant quantitative relations exist. The clear recognition of that proposition means, whenever it appears, the death of magic and the birth of science. This fact indicates the opposition of the magical to the scientific attitude.1 Magical and Religious Factors in the Development of the Human Will. FELIX KRUEGER, University of Halle. Regarding labor as a continuous, purposive and organized activity, comparatively independent of accidental stimuli, primitive tribes work or labor far less than we. There are many facts, proving primitive man's volitional inability to work. Under certain "irrational" conditions, and in magical or religious forms, we see him performing extensive and accurately regulated work. He tries to influence the weather, birth, sickness, prepares ritually for war or hunting. Primitive man's waking life is largely filled with dancing, singing and music, not as mere amusement, but as expressions of emotional tension and as conventional, magically effective procedures. In human development, the beginnings of labor, in the psychological sense, are closely related to magical and religious ceremonies. These are the first temporally, spatially and qualitatively regulated forms of social activity. The magical and religious performances are believed to be most effective and at the same time very dangerous. Such irrational regulations first teach self-restraint and sacrifice, independence from momentary stimuli essential conditions to the will's development. The procedures of the magician or medicine-man represent the first profession, of a single individual. From magico-religious qualities and taboo arise all primitive social privilege and every institution of group or personal property. 1 See for developments Parts I. and II. of the author's book, A Psychological Study of Religion; its Origin, Function and Future, Macmillan, 1912. |