FACILITIES FOR TEACHING.
But the university laboratory is for teaching as well as for discovering. It is equipped for the undergraduate, as well as for the advanced investigator. The elementary or demonstrational courses are designed to impress upon the student the facts, the methods, and the spirit of his science. There is now furnished for these, at Harvard, nearly every kind of apparatus commonly used in physical and physiological laboratories, for the study of neurology, optics, acoustics, kinesthetics, esthetics, anthropology, and so on. The electrical department is a miniature laboratory in itself. And the various models in wax, wire, and plaster—of eyes, ears, brains, fishes, reptiles, monkeys, children, adults, idiots, insane people, and people of genius—is a veritable museum.[3]
How interesting these things are to a thoughtful man may be told to the readers of McClure’s Magazine in an anecdote which they have a peculiar right to hear. Its founder, a few months ago, stood before a shelf full of the very pedagogic images which his illustrations now present to you. I pointed out a series of dainty models, showing, comparatively, the various evolutionary stages of brain development in the animal kingdom. His eyes fastened on them and—there they stayed.
The same part of each brain was tinted in the same color. I showed him the olfactory lobes; in man, two little insignificant yellow streaks; in the shark, two big bulbs larger than all the rest of the brain together. I thus made visible to him how small a sphere “smell” plays in our mental life, while pretty nearly the whole life of the shark must be a world of smells. I showed him the optic lobes in the brain of a blind mole, and then in that of a carrier pigeon, which sees its way over dizzy leagues to familiar places. I showed him the cerebellum of the rabbit that hops, the fish that swims, and the alligator that crawls. I say, he stood still, almost. I could get him to look at nothing else. He seemed to see, projecting down future volumes of McClure’s Magazine, pages after pages of comparative mental menageries—pink infundibula swimming in blue Gulf Streams; green cerebra flying through gorgeous sunsets; oceans of terrific shark-smells diagrammatically printed in blood red; and Kipling poems of adventure sent to press in surprising variegations of color, the more scientifically to express their psychological emotions. He stood till he murmured, “We must have an article on this,” and rushed to the train or to the telegraph office, and secured, I suspect, from Professor Drummond, his now famous article, “Where Man Got His Ears.”—H. N.
GUSTAVE THEODORE FECHNER.
The laboratory workshop is provided with the common implements and facilities required for working in wood, glass, and metal. Both for original research and for demonstration, this laboratory is the most unique, the richest, and the most complete in any country; and in witness of the fame and genius of its present director, and of the rapidly spreading interest in experimental psychology, particularly in America, there are already gathered here, under Professor Münsterberg’s administration, a larger number of students specially devoted to mental science than ever previously studied together in any one place.