Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/617

Rh and look at the diversity of cats and dogs, goats and sheep, beetles and butterflies, soles and shrimps, that even the ordinary unlearned man knows and recognizes, and mostly remembers. Narrow the question down to dogs alone, and still you get the same result. Consider the St. Bernards and the mastiffs, the pugs and the bull-dogs, the black-and-tans and the King Charlies, the sheep-dogs and the deerhounds, the shivering little Italian greyhounds and the long dachshunds that you buy by the yard. Every one of these and countless others has got to have its cell all to itself in the classificatory department of the human brain, and I suppose another cell for its name in the portion specially devoted to language also. Add to these the plants, flowers, fruits, roots, and other well-known vegetable products whose names are familiar to almost everybody, and what a total you have got at once 1 A good botanist, to take a more specific case, knows (in addition to a stock of general knowledge about equivalent on the average to anybody else's) the names and natures of hundreds and thousands of distinct plants, to say nothing about innumerable small peculiarities of stem, and leaf, and flower, and seed in every species and variety among them all. No, the mere bare weight of dead fact with which everybody's memory is stored and laden defies the possibility of reckoning and pigeon-holing. Make your separate dockets ever so tiny, reduce them all to their smallest dimensions, and yet there will not be room for all of them in the human brain. The more we think on it, the more will the wonder grow that one small head can carry all that the merest infant knows.

And now observe once more in turn a still greater and more fatal difficulty. I have spoken throughout, after the manner of men, as though each separate object, or word, or idea had a clearly defined and limited individuality, and that it could be distinctly located and circumscribed by itself in a single solitary isolated cell of the nervous mechanism. But in reality the very terms I have been obliged to use in describing the matter have themselves contained the implicit condemnation of this crude, hard, and impossible materialistic conception. For no idea and no word is, as a matter of fact, so rigidly one and indivisible, like the French Republic. Take for example once more our old friend "dog," and let us confine our attention just now to the word alone, not to the ideas connoted by it. Dog is not one word: it is a whole group and set of words. There is, first of all, the audible sound, dog, as it falls upon our ears when spoken by another. That is to say, there is, imprimis, dog auditory. Secondly, there is the muscular effort, dog, as it frames itself upon our own lips and vocal organs when we say it aloud to another person. That is to say, there is, secundo, dog pronounceable. Thirdly, there is the written or printed word, dog, DOG, in capitals or minuscules, script, or Roman, or italic, as we recognize it visibly when seen with our eyes in book or letter. That is to say, there is, tertio, dog legible. Now, it is quite clear that