person speaking or read a page of print,
much of what we think we see or hear is supplied from our memory. We
overlook misprints, imagining the right letters, though we see the wrong
ones; and how little we actually hear, when we listen to speech, we
realize when we go to a foreign theatre; for there what troubles us is
not so much that we cannot understand what the actors say as that we
cannot hear their words. The fact is that we hear quite as little under
similar conditions at home, only our mind, being fuller of English
verbal associations, supplies the requisite material for comprehension
upon a much slighter auditory hint.

In all the apperceptive operations of the mind, a certain general law
makes itself felt,--the law of economy. In admitting a new body of
experience, we instinctively seek to disturb as little as possible our
pre-existing stock of ideas. We always try to name a new experience in
some way which will assimilate it to what we already know. We hate
anything _absolutely_ new, anything without any name, and for which a
new name must be forged. So we take the nearest name, even though it be
inappropriate. A child will call snow, when he sees it for the first
time, sugar or white butterflies. The sail of a boat he calls a curtain;
an egg in its shell, seen for the first time, he calls a pretty potato;
an orange, a ball; a folding corkscrew, a pair of bad scissors. Caspar
Hauser called the first geese he saw horses, and the Polynesians called
Captain Cook's horses pigs. Mr. Rooper has written a little book on
apperception, to which he gives the title of "A Pot of Green Feathers,"
that being the name applied to a pot of ferns by a child who had never
seen ferns before.

In later life this economical tendency to leave the old undisturbed
leads to what we know as 'old fogyism.' A new idea or a fact which would
entail extensive rearrangement of the previous system of beliefs is
always ignored or extruded from the mind in case it cannot be
sophistically reinterpreted so as to tally harmoniously with the system.
We have all conducted discussions with middle-aged people, overpowered
them with our reasons, forced them to admit our contention, and a week
later found them back as secure and constant in their old opinion as if
they had never conversed with us at all. We call them old fogies; but
there are young fogies, too. Old fogyism begins at a younger age than
we think. I am almost afraid to say so, but I beli