Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/167

Rh vision of things impending. Here also the bias of earlier experience and of training plays an important rôle. Remembering the recent disasters in Europe, Italian laborers in Chicago quit work to fall on their knees and pray. Recalling a prophecy of the coming of the end of the world three days later, some Zionists are reported to have concluded that the earthquake was the beginning of the fulfillment of the prophecy. Some persons who had left their houses, refused for hours to enter them again, fearing a repetition of the earthquake. A prisoner in a jail is said to have speculated on his chances of getting away, in case the walls of the jail would fall, and some people in Chicago feared the coming of a "tidal" wave from Lake Michigan.

It is well known that afferent impulses, especially if they are powerful, have the effect of inhibiting or interfering with central psychic activities. Such inhibition was probably responsible for the forgetfulness of a reporter who sent in his account of the earthquake in a neighboring city to a newspaper in Clinton, but forgot to affix his signature. It explains also the action of a woman in a hospital, who was walking on crutches and who ran out without them, to escape from the building. With the inhibition of man's reason, his instincts take its place, and it would seem that many of our instinctive actions are not much different from those of the brute. They are exemplified in the panics that took place in a few factories and schools. When people rushed from buildings and started to run on the streets, they acted on instinctive impulses. These actions must have been prompted by a nervous mechanism quite like the mechanism that started several runaway horses in places where the earthquake was sufficiently severe to appear alarming. The launching of sensational rumors during a general excitement is traceable to a related instinct, only more refined and exclusively human. The reflex was started on this occasion by a fire in a kitchen in Aurora, and the reaction announced that "Aurora is burning up."

One phenomenon in this connection is almost embarrassing to mention, in view of the present growing sentiment in favor of women's rights and woman suffrage. It appears from the effects of the recent earthquake on the American people, that human reason is more readily inhibited in the gentler sex and in children, than in men. The statement may be worded in another, and perhaps a better way, by saying that human instincts are relatively stronger in woman than in man. This statement will hardly pass as anything new. This distinction is implied in the wording of one report, which states that "men were excited, women and children frightened." It is stated that in Dubuque a panic was narrowly averted in a shop where women worked. In an office building in the same city it happened that the women rushed in a panic to the stairs, and that men met them and quieted them. In a home for young women the jar is said to have "scared the