Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/545

Rh in literature, science, art, or philosophy inspires a thousand imitators. All composition, whether of prose or poetry, is in the ground of it imitative—a fact sufficently suggested by the grotesquely moral turn ordinarily given to college and school essays, by the accession of literary power which always follows much reading, and by the imitation of any particular author or style to which great liking for one or the other inevitably leads. What has been called the contagiousness of example is really the power of a strong impression, and therefore practically of stress, to produce likeness. This may be noticed at public meetings, where people applaud or cheer gregariously, and do other acts, such as those of sitting or standing, with obvious reference to what others are doing. The ease with which a stammerer communicates his defect to another is a matter of common observation. Movements or actions of persons sitting together, such as yawning, coughing, and the like, tend to be propagated more or less through the whole of them by unconscious imitation. To the same process is due the spread of more or less hysterical ailments among a company of persons, such as the often-recorded mania for mewing among nuns, or the propagation of convulsions among girls in factories. Simple movements, like the shifting of a chair, the rustling of a paper, audible change in the position of the body often follow involuntarily in others after they have occurred in one of the persons associated. If in a thoroughfare a man be encountered staring intently and conspicuously at some portion of the sky, most of those who see him will at once direct their gaze in the same direction. A man watching an athletic feat, or a stroke at billiards, in which he is deeply interested, will often at a critical moment imitate the attitudes or action of the performer.

The law is further abundantly illustrated by facts relating to the lower animals. These find the greatest ease of association as likes, and come together everywhere in Nature on the ground of likeness. The general evidence of this is familiar, and mention need be made here only of a representative example. In the Falkland Islands, for instance, where the cattle have run wild, and where they are of several different colors, each color keeps in a separate herd, often restricted to one part of the island; among the wild horses of Paraguay, those of the same color and size associate with each other; in Circassia three races of horses exist which, when living in freedom, always refuse to mingle and cross; on the Färöe Islands the half-wild, native black sheep resist attempts to breed them with imported white sheep; in the Forest of Dean and the New Forest the dark and pale colored herds of fallow deer have never been known to mingle; the merino and heath sheep of Scotland, if the two flocks are mixed together, will