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]
[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.
[Illustration: 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
Muensterberg's administration, a larger number of students specially
devoted to mental science than ever previously studied together in
any one place.