This raised her doubts to such a pitch
She fell exhausted in the ditch,
Not knowing how to run.”
The point, of course, is that she could execute the complex movement of her legs well enough until her brain was set to work and her conscious attention given to the matter. Then “cerebral inhibition” took place and she broke down.
20. Colour-photography and Photographs of Mars
There were admirable photographs of wild birds and their nests, and of insects and plants in this exhibition. I saw the new Lumière coloured transparent photographs thrown by a lantern on the screen, and could distinguish the dots of red, green, and violet colour on what, at a little distance, appeared to be a brilliantly white part of the picture (the shirt collar of a “sitter”), just as one sees a mosaic of coloured dots in the blazing sunlight of the pictures painted by the French school of so-called “vibristes” (Monod and others). Perhaps the most remarkable of these photographs was a set of prints from untouched photographs of the planet Mars, executed in July 1907 by Professor Perceval Lowell at his observatory in Arizona.
The Mars photographs are each about as big as a dried pea (that is the biggest size possible with the feeble light reflected by Mars), but “several of the canals,” says Mr. Lowell, “are distinctly visible on the photographs, and one has been photographed double.” I should have liked to examine these photographs in a good light with a lens. The statement quoted means that the canals in Mars can no longer be regarded as due to errors of eyesight and imagination, and that the annual doubling or formation of a second canal parallel to what was earlier in the year a single canal, is actually recorded by a disinterested, impartial photographic plate. Are these canals the work of intelligent inhabitants of Mars? I will not venture to say in reply more than this, that I have never heard any other explanation of their occurrence. But that, of course, still leaves the matter open.
21. Origin of Names by Errors in Copying
A curious illustration of a mistake perpetuated by a clerical error is the title of Viscount Glerawly. The title was intended to have been Glenawly, but the bad writing of a clerk converted the “n” into an “r,” and the name having been so entered in the patent of nobility, or some such document, could not be altered. The same thing has happened to the mammoth. His proper native name is “mammont,” but “mont” became “mout,” and then “moth.” A similar clerical error is responsible for the name Gavial, which is applied to the long, narrow-nosed crocodile of India, both as a scientific name (Gavialis) and colloquially. Really the “v” is due to a misreading of an “r,” the creature’s native name being Garial. It was so written down and sent home by an early explorer, but his handwriting being wanting in clearness, the word was copied as Gavial and the scientific patent issued in that name.