How much goes to sound observing is thus stated by John Stuart Mill,—“The observer is not he who merely sees the thing which is before his eyes, but he who sees what parts the thing is composed of. One person, from inattention, or attending only in the wrong place, overlooks half of what he sees; another sets down much more than he sees, confounding it with what he imagines, or with what he infers; another takes note of the kind of all the circumstances, but being inexpert in estimating their degree, leaves the quantity of each vague and uncertain; another sees indeed the whole, but makes such an awkward division of it into parts, throwing into one mass things which require to be separated, and separating others which might more conveniently be considered as one, that the result is much the same, sometimes even worse than if no analysis had been attempted at all.”
How an explorer of ability may witness a new fact without realizing that it points to a great industry, is shown in the case of Lord Dundonald. In 1782, or thereabout, near Culross Abbey in Scotland, he built a tar-kiln. Noticing the inflammable nature of a vapor arising during the distillation of tar, the Earl, by way of experiment, fitted a gun-barrel to the eduction pipe leading from the condenser. On applying fire to the muzzle, a vivid light blazed forth across the waters of the Frith, distinctly visible on the opposite shore. Soon afterward the inventor visited James Watt at Handsworth, near Birmingham, and told him about the gas-lighting at the kiln, but his host paid no attention to the matter. His assistant, William Murdock, however, was impressed by the story, and some years later applied gas to the illumination of the Soho works where Watt’s engines were built. This was the beginning of gas-lighting as a practical business.
Professor Adam Sedgwick, of Cambridge University, famous as a geologist, and Charles Darwin once took an excursion in Wales amid markings of extraordinary interest which neither of them noticed. Darwin tells us: “I had a striking instance of how easy it is to overlook phenomena, however conspicuous, before they have been observed by any one. We spent many hours at Cwm Idwal, examining the rocks with extreme care, as Sedgwick was anxious to find fossils in them, but neither of us saw a trace of the wonderful glacial phenomena all around us; we did not notice the plainly scored rocks, the perched boulders, the lateral and terminal moraines, yet these phenomena are so conspicuous that, as I declared in a paper published many years afterward, a house burnt down by fire could not tell its story more plainly than did this valley. If it had been filled with a glacier, the phenomena would have been less distinct than they now are.” At a later day when Darwin’s powers of observation had become acute in the highest degree, he noticed a bird’s feet covered with dirt. Rather a common fact, not worth dwelling on, earlier observers had supposed. Not so thought Darwin. He carefully washed the bird’s feet, and planting the removed solids he was rewarded with several strange plants brought from afar by his winged visitor.
A cousin to Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, is an investigator of eminence. In a study of visual memory, a faculty in which observation bears its best fruits, he says:—
“It is a mistake to suppose that sharp sight is accompanied by clear visual memory. I have not a few instances in which the independence of the two faculties is emphatically commented upon; and I have at least one clear case where great interest in outlines and accurate apprehension of straightness, squareness, and the like, is unaccompanied by the power of visualizing.”
A new instrument, machine or engine is imagined by its creator long before it takes actual form; everything he sees that will be of help he builds at once into his design, everything else, however interesting in itself, he passes with a heedless eye.
Think Birds and You Shall See Birds.
“If we think birds, we shall see birds wherever we go,” says John Burroughs. An observer faithful and accurate in noticing birds and beasts, rocks and leaves, may come at last upon a flower which opens a sphere of knowledge wholly new, as when the round-leaved sun-dew was first observed to entrap and feed upon insects. Much, also, depends upon comparisons such as occur only to a mind at once broad and alert. One may notice in spring and early summer a few leaves growing directly from the trunk of a tree, sometimes near the ground. In maples these leaves are decidedly narrower than those growing from branches in the usual way, and they often have a reddish tinge. Comparing a variety of such leaves with fossil impressions of allied species, Professor Robert T. Jackson of Boston came upon an interesting discovery. He found that these sporadic leaves closely resemble those borne by the remote ancestors of our present trees: they are the lingering reminders of a far distant day.
An observation equally keen saved the orange groves of California from destruction by the fluted scale insect. In 1890, or thereabout, the orange growers in their extremity sought the advice of Professor C. V. Riley, entomologist to the Department of Agriculture at Washington. He asked: “Where did the pest come from?” “Australia,” was the answer. “Is it much of a nuisance there?” “Not particularly.” “Then what keeps it down, what preys upon it?” “Nothing specially,” was the response. Dissatisfied with this answer, Professor Riley sent to Australia a trained entomologist and acute observer, Mr. Albert Koebele, who gathered various insects noticed as preying upon the fluted scale. Distributing these upon his arrival in California he was fortunate enough to find that one of his assisted emigrants, a lady bird, Vedalia cardinalis, fed so ravenously upon the fluted scale as to restrict its ravages to quite moderate proportions.