< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu
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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

color. They are never satisfied, for instance, with saying "blue," but will take a great deal of trouble to express or to match the particular blue they mean. Lastly, no two people agree, or hardly ever do so, as to the color they associate with the same sound. I have one of the most extraordinary diagrams of these color associations that has, I suppose, ever been produced. It has been drawn by Mr. J. Key, of Graham's Town, South Africa. He sent me in the first instance a communication on the subject, which led to further correspondence, and eventually to the production of this diagram of colors in connection with letters and words. I have no reason to doubt its trustworthiness, and am bound to say that, strange as it looks, and elaborate as it is, I have other written accounts that almost match it.

A third curious and abiding fantasy of certain persons is invariably to connect visualized pictures with words, the same picture to the same word. I have collected many cases of this, and am much indebted to the authoress, Mrs. Haweis, who sees these pictures, for her kindness in sketching some of them for me, and her permission to use her name in guarantee of their genuineness. She says:

Printed words have always bad faces to me: they had definite expressions, and certain faces made me think of certain words. The words had no connection with these except sometimes by accident. The instances I give are few and ridiculous. When I think of the word Beast, it has a face something like a gargoyle. The word Green has also a gargoyle-face, with the addition of big teeth. The word Blue blinks and looks silly, and turns to the right. The word Attention has the eyes greatly turned to the left. It is difficult to draw them properly, because, like "Alice's" "Cheshire cat," which at times became a grin without a cat, these faces have expression without features. The expression, of course [note the naïve phrase, "of course."—F.G.], depends greatly on those of the letters, which have likewise their faces and figures. All the little a's turn their eyes to the left; this determines the eyes of Attention. Ant, however, looks a little down. Of course, these faces are endless as words are, and it makes my head ache to retain them long enough to draw.

Some of the figures are very quaint. Thus the interrogation "what?" always excites the idea of a fat man cracking a long whip. They are not the capricious creations of the fancy of the moment, but are the regular concomitants of the words, and have been so as far back as the memory is able to recall.

When in perfect darkness, if the field of view be carefully watched, many persons will find a perpetual series of changes to be going on automatically and wastefully in it. I have much evidence of this. I will give my own experience the first, which is striking to me, because I am very unimpressionable in these matters. I visualize with effort; I am peculiarly inapt to see "after-images," "phosphenes," "light-dust," and other phenomena due to weak sight or sensitiveness; and, again, before I thought of carefully trying, I should have emphatically declared that my field of view in the dark was essentially of a

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