Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/147

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psychology may furnish the basis for a future classification of the figures.

In some cases it is possible to foresee what the result of each manipulation will be, even to a person whose visual imagination is but poorly developed, much more to those in whom it is highly developed, as is probably the case in most races of low culture. In other figures it is almost inconceivable that anyone could foresee the results of a given manipulation. In the figure of the Apache door, with which Mrs. Jayne begins her book, the strings at the penultimate stage of the game are in such an intricate jumble that it is incredible that anyone should be able to foresee that the next step will bring order to what seems an irretrievable chaos.

The interest of this lies in the fact that the first kind of figure could be discovered by one endowed with patience and a vivid visual imagination, while the second kind, if not arrived at by purely random manipulations, which is very improbable, must have been discovered by one who went to work with a definite idea in his mind. In the case of the Apache door, it is not difficult to see what this idea may have been. The special feature of this interesting figure is the reversal, at the end of a series of manipulations, of a movement which had been made at the beginning. It would seem as if the inventor of this figure had planned that he would throw the index loops over the hands, would then carry out a number of manipulations, and at the end would try the effect of bringing the original index loops back to the palms. The mental processes concerned in the latter method are of a higher order than those involved in the former, where the player merely proceeds from one concrete image to another. It seems to me that in general the figures made by the Papuans belong to the first group, while those of the second kind occur in America, and this is in accordance with what we might expect from the respective degrees of mental development of the two peoples.

At the end of her book, Mrs. Jayne gives some invented figures, and, in connection with the point just raised, it would have been interesting if these descriptions had been accom- panied by introspective records of the processes followed by the