Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/156

152 Whatever more extended observations may show, the writer of this paper has found it a very simple matter to pick out individuals who will make good subjects for muscle-reading—an experiment that succeeds best with those whose movements are most automatic—by a preliminary test in which the subject, blindfolded, is required to write his name rapidly in sequence while counting aloud by a given interval, say by 13's. The writing of those individuals who would serve best in the proposed test shows a progressive enlargement and, moreover, characteristic pen-lapses.

The question may then be raised whether such difference in mental type reveals itself in normal handwriting, and an affirmative answer seems not presumptuous, although a detailed study of handwriting from this standpoint has not, so far as the writer knows, been instituted experimentally. It should be noted, however, that in the thought process which accompanies writing during composition, momentary distractions occur frequently, for thought, even in the case of rapid penmen, is apt to run ahead of the writing. Who does not number among his correspondents those whose final letters trail off into an indistinguishable scrawl; and others who end with a flourish that marks well the motor abandon? Characteristic revelations, no doubt, although interpretation as yet must be exceedingly diffident.

It is interesting to note in this connection the interpretation graphologists put upon the size of writing as indicative of individual traits. Distinction, power, frankness, honesty are held to reveal themselves by magnified writing either throughout writing as a whole or at the termination of words. Minute writing throughout or at the close of words is held to indicate, in the case of superior intelligence, artifice or preoccupation with metaphysical or other minutæ; in the case of inferior minds, miserliness. Usually, the graphologists emphasize legibility of terminal letters as highly indicative of frankness; while, on the other hand, the tendency to terminate letters in filiform fashion as evidence of a veiling of self. Mere exhibition of documents from persons of known characteristics seems, it must be said, inadequate proof of such propositions. Variations from the normal in the handwriting of any individual would under defined conditions be of more value for general interpretative purposes than would variation from one person to another. Nor can facile analogies appear worthy of serious attention until the causal relation between certain temperamental traits and the facilitation or inhibition of movement is better understood.

The attempt to study handwriting in the light of psychological analyses already in progress bids fair to help analysis, as well as to increase our knowledge of the psychology of handwriting. The relation of the inner word to the outer visible one has long interested