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feeling is a new kind of sensation altogether, not a mere 'appearance' due to many sensations of dry stroke being compounded into one. No sensations of dry stroke can exist under these circumstances, for their physiological conditions have been replaced by others. What 'compounding' there is has already taken place in the braincells before the threshold of sensation was reached. Just so red light and green light beating on the retina in rapid enough alternation, arouse the central process to which the sensation yellow directly corresponds. The sensations of red and of green get no chance, under such conditions, to be born. Just so if the muscle could feel, it would have a certain sort of feeling when it gave a single twitch, but it would undoubtedly have a distinct sort of feeling altogether, when it contracted tetanically; and this feeling of the tetanic contraction would by no means be identical with a multitude of the feelings of twitching.

Harmony and Discord.-When several tones sound together we may get peculiar feelings of pleasure or displeasure designated as consonance and dissonance respectively. A note sounds most consonant with its octave. When with the octave the 'third' and the 'fifth' of the note are sounded, for instance c-e-g-c', we get the 'full chord' or maximum of consonance. The ratios of vibration here are as 4:5:6:8, so that one might think simple ratios were the ground of harmony. But the interval c-d is discordant, with the comparatively simple ratio 8: 9. Helmholtz explains discord by the overtones making 'beats' together. This gives a subtle grating which is unpleasant. Where the overtones make no 'beats', or beats too rapid for their effect to be perceptible, there is consonance, according to Helmholtz, which is thus a negative rather than a positive thing. Wundt explains consonance by the presence of strong identical overtones in the notes which harmonize. No one of these explanations of musical harmony can be called quite satisfactory; and the subject is too intricate to be treated farther in this place.

Discriminative Sensibility of the Ear.--Weber's law holds fairly well for the intensity of sounds. If ivory or metal balls are dropped on an ebony or iron plate, they make a sound which is the louder as they are heavier or dropped from a greater height. Experimenting in this way (after others) Merkel found that the just perceptible increment of loudness required an increase of of the original stimulus everywhere between the intensities marked 20 and 5000 of his arbitrary scale. Below this the fractional increment of stimulus must be larger; above it, no measurements were made.

Discrimination of differences of pitch varies in different parts of the scale. In the neighborhood of 1000 vibrations per second, one fifth of a vibration more or less can make the sound sharp or flat for a good ear. It takes a much greater relative alteration to sound sharp or flat elsewhere on the scale. The chromatic scale itself has been used as an illustration of Weber's law. The notes seem to differ equally from each other, yet their vibration-numbers form a series of which each is a certain multiple of the last. This, however, has nothing to do with intensities or just perceptible differences; so the peculiar parallelism between the sensation series and the outer-stimulus series forms here a case all by itself, rather than an instance under Weber's more general law.

CHAPTER V.

TOUCH, THE TEMPERATURE SENSE, THE MUSCULAR SENSE, AND PAIN.

Nerve-endings in the Skin.-"Many of the afferent skin-nerves end in connection with hair-bulbs; the fine hairs over most of the cutaneous surface, projecting from the skin, transmit any movement impressed on them, with increased force, to the nerve-fibres at their fixed ends. Fine branches of axis-cylinders have also been described. as penetrating between epidermic cells and ending there without terminal organs. In or immediately beneath the skin several peculiar forms of nerve end-organs have also been described; the conjunctiva of the they are known as (1) Touch-cells; human eye, magnified. (2) Pacinian corpuscles; (3) Tactile corpuscles; (4) End-bulbs."*

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FIG. 24.-End-bulbs from

These bodies all consist essentially of granules formed of connective tissue, in which or round about which one or more sensory nerve-fibres terminate. They probably magnify impressions just as a grain of sand does in a shoe, or a crumb does in a finger of a glove.

Touch, or the Pressure Sense.-"Through the skin we get several kinds of sensation; touch proper, heat and cold, and pain; and we can with more or less accuracy localize them on the surface of the body. The interior of the mouth possesses also three sensibilities. Through touch proper we recognize pressure or traction exerted on the skin, and the force of the pressure; the softness or hardness, roughness or smoothness, of the body producing it; *Martin: op. cit.

and the form of this when not too large to be felt all over. When to learn the form of an object we move the hand over it, muscular sensations are combined with proper tactile, and such a combination of the two sensations is frequent; moreover, we rarely touch anything without at the same time getting temperature sensations; therefore pure tactile feelings are rare. From an evolution point of view, touch is probably the first distinctly differentiated sensation, and this primary position it still largely holds in our nental life."*

Objects are most important to us when in direct contact. The chief function of our eyes and ears is to enable us to prepare ourselves for contact with approaching bodies, or to ward such contact off. They have accordingly been characterized as organs of anticipatory touch.

"The delicacy of the tactile sense varies on different parts of the skin; it is greatest on the forehead, temples, and back of the forearm, where a weight of 2 milligr. pressing on an area of 9 sq. millim. can be felt.

"In order that the sense of touch may be excited neighboring skin-areas must be differently pressed. When the hand is immersed in a liquid, as mercury, which fits into all its inequalities and presses with practically the same weight on all neighboring immersed areas, the sense of pressure is only felt at a line along the surface, where the immersed and non-immersed parts of the skin meet.

The Localizing Power of the Skin.-" When the eyes are closed and a point of the skin is touched we can with some accuracy indicate the region stimulated; although tactile feelings are in general characters alike, they differ in something besides intensity by which we can distinguish them; some sub-sensation quality not rising definitely into prominence in consciousness must be present, comparable to the upper partials determining the timbre of a tone. The accuracy of the localizing power varies widely in different

*Martin: op. cit.

skin regions and is measured by observing the least distance which must separate two objects (as the blunted points of a pair of compasses) in order that they may be felt as two. The following table illustrates some of the differences observed:

Tongue-tip

1.1 mm.

(.04 inch)

Palm side of last phalanx of finger... 2.2 mm.

(.08 inch)

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Middle of back....

The localizing power is a little more acute across the long axis of a limb than in it; and is better when the pressure is only strong enough to just cause a distinct tactile sensation than when it is more powerful; it is also very readily and rapidly improvable by practice." It seems to be naturally delicate in proportion as the skin which possesses it covers a more movable part of the body.

"It might be thought that this localizing power depended directly on nerve-distribution; that each touch-nerve had connection with a special brain-centre at one end (the excitation of which caused a sensation with a characteristic local sign), and at the other end was distributed over a certain skin-area, and that the larger this area the farther apart might two points be and still give rise to only one sensation. If this were so, however, the peripheral tactile areas (each being determined by the

FIG. 25.

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