Article March 2, 1907 Issue

SEEING INVISIBLE THINGS

M. G. KAINS.

In few fields of thought does interest play so important a role in the progress of the student as in the sciences. Unless the novice possess at least an inclination to become interested, have an incipient or potential interest, as it were, such knowledge as he may acquire through association with other scientists or through compulsion will be superficial and more or less ephemeral, because to him it will lack the vital spark of interest and consequent value. With interest as the basis the student may always be on the qui vive to grasp some new truth, catch some new thought, see something previously invisible.

This is particularly well illustrated in the study of plants and the smaller animals such as insects. He who lacks interest may walk miles through fields abloom with flowers and dancing with animal life, but be aware of nothing save grass and such few insects as leap upon him. Even the naturalist, intent upon finding certain kinds of minute plants or animals, may become so oblivious to other kinds as to be almost if not quite unconscious of trees and even large animals. Yet his interest may be so acute and his eye so alert that he can pick out at considerable distances insects, for example, perfectly invisible to the untrained eye through their protective coloring.

This term protective coloring aptly conveys the idea that certain animals, especially insects, so closely resemble their surroundings as to be practically hidden from the untrained searcher; but in a wider sense it conveys the more important idea that the eye which glimpses them in their visible concealment is a trained eye, the ready servant of an interested thought. Nay, further, it shows that this interested thought, as a rule, already holds a more or less clear mental picture of the animal or plant, which becomes manifest the moment this mental picture is brought into the presence of the actual creature; just as a person having a photograph of one he has never seen recognizes the original at sight. The mental picture need not, however, be very definitely outlined in the student's thought. Indeed it is self-evident that such cannot always be the case. No human being knows it all. The essentials are that the student be interested and have an open thought unhampered by preconceived notions, especially those due to erroneous training, so as to be alert to grasp, relate, and translate mental impressions, in order to advance from the known and proved to the unknown. It was such openness of thought that led Newton to the discovery of the law of gravitation, which led Adams in England and Leverrier in France simultaneously but independently to proclaim the existence of the planet Neptune, which neither of them had seen, but which was found by astronomers who followed these scientists' directions. It is such receptivity of thought which has given to the world the vast majority of useful and interesting inventions.

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