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pears in a cloud of its own steam; his rickety derrick is a spider web of guy ropes and bailing wire. With the first stroke of his bit begins a fight against all the manifold perversities of inanimate things: a caving hole, unexpected water and gas strata, mechanical breakdowns; and finally, of course, his wireline snaps at the rope socket and leaves the tools in the hole just a few feet from the oil sand. Sixty feet of shale caves in on the drilling tools, and in time other tools used to fish for them are also lost in the hole. In the phrase of the oil fields, he has 'everything in the hole but the boiler.' The strain of 'fishing' is too much for the aged derrick and it pulls in; his men are unpaid, his credit exhausted. Without a thought of quitting, Jim trudges to town and trades another forty-acre lease for a secondhand automobile, sells the car for enough to pay the repairs on the derrick and a part payment to his drillers, and the hole is finally cleaned. Then, one day there comes a puff of gas at the casing-head, a 'rainbow' on the bit and stem; the hole fills up rapidly with oil; 1000 feet, then 1500 feet, then a rich golden-green fountain-flashing in the sunlight, flowing over the derrick!

A great day, you say a rich reward for all his trouble. He has made a well of it! A two-hundred or threehundred barrel well — a little miracle, one chance in five! Wealth, flowing from the stored-up treasure of the Devonian age. Clean money,' as Jim says; that adds something to the world's store and helps man in his painful upward struggle from chaos to order. Drilling an oil well is your true creative gesture. It enriches the world and robs no man. Jim's brief hour of prosperity sees no one the poorer for it. Who, more than Dry Hole Jim, shall serve to deliver mankind from a world that is 'heartless, furtive, narrow, bleak, mournful, mean, and inhuman?'

VOL. 134-NO. 5

I do not know what Heaven is reserved beyond the Great Divide for the wildcatter. It must, at best, be a tame affair, a matter of mere Celestial Harmonies, with no musical splash and roar of the oil in the flow tank.

But Jim's Paradise is still far off. The very next day, one of the buzzards of the law, ever hovering near the new wildcat well, swoops down with a fake Indian heir, brings suit, and paralyzes Jim's oil sales by garnishment of the pipe-line company. Choosing reluctantly between blackmail and a charge of manslaughter, Jim borrows enough to settle the claim out of court. Then follows the supreme disaster. Some field in Mexico or California comes in with a new flood of oil, and the crude market breaks. With tanks full and overflowing, he cannot sell a drop of his oil. His wells would suffer if he closed down, and yet he has no market for his product. By selling another interest in the well, by staving off lawsuits and liens, by selling a little oil for fuel, by twist and turn, Jim survives the long depression, and now after five years he has battled through to ten barrels of 'settled production,' a sacred symbol; Jim has attained to the dignity of an Oil Producer,' with us an elevation to the ranks of the Elect a commercial Croix de Guerre. And remember, you of the Brotherhood of the Internal Combustion Engine, that were it not for the Dry Hole Jims, who have discovered over fifty per cent of the mid-continent pools, you would find a posted price of gasoline at your filling stations that would afford you all the vivid sensations of a paralytic shock. All the 'World Struggle for Petroleum,' all the ponderous interlocking mechanism of great corporate agencies could not accomplish the commercial miracle of selling 5300 British Thermal Units of power for one cent were it not for the individual initiative and enterprise of Dry Hole Jim and his fraternity.

It is not for his importance to the community and economic laws that we hold Dry Hole Jim in such high esteem in our town. Economic laws we never think of, except when the big companies use them as an excuse for cutting the price they pay us for our oil. Let us say it is rather because we dimly sense the kinship between Jim and certain hardy forbears of his who broke the trails into western forests; felled their trees; built their cabins; defended them at the loophole; fared then even farther out across the mountains with pick and gold-rocker and transit. It is not because of Jim's relation to the mechanism of modern civilized life that we value him in our town, but rather because we reverence the fast vanishing spirit of the pioneer, the adventurer, and the explorer.

If by some miracle we are, as we claim, preserved from the American Malady, if there be found in our town no symptoms of spiritual malaria, we know that we shall be assaulted with demands for an explanation — a formula. We are prepared to furnish it. It is because our glass, ours and Jim's, is constantly filmed over by the magic of that last thrice-blessed sprite of Pandora's box. We live in an atmosphere of eternal, unquenchable hope! If there be a trace of ingrained pessimism here, it is only that which Mr. James describes as born of long compulsory association with the optimist. No one can be an 'Oil Producer' who is not possessed of such fundamental, fixed, and inborn optimism as will be unshaken and undimmed by the longest succession of dry holes, or the lowest, most desperate of markets for 'crude.' This is not the thin Pollyanna vacuity of spirit that 'glows with the happiness of mere being,' but a certain contentment with a simple philosophy of everyday life which is based on creative effort in our hours of labor and a cheerful sane preoccupation in our moments of leisure.

We have our faults. We know them. We do not have the rich cultural atmosphere of the Acropolis. But then, we banish no Solons. On the contrary we make geologists of them and drill dry holes on their judgment. We lack the ideals, the noble behavior, the intellectual enjoyments of the Italian Renaissance, yet we do not burn our Savonarolas. Our Chamber of Commerce organizes 'drives' for them or includes their activities in the budget of our 'Charity Chest.' And, if you think to shame and abash us, to humiliate us, to puncture our conceit by asking where is our 'thrice-hammered hardihood of Rome,' then with a clear, ringing chorus we respond, 'We have Dry Hole Jim, God bless him!'

It would appear, therefore, that we are hopelessly resigned to our lot as one that has fallen to us in the Industrial Era, or, if you will humor us, in the Oil Age. We are even reconciled to the fact that we have moved out 'into the void' beyond the rich popular culture of violin and clavichord, a culture tempered perhaps by rack and thumbscrew. We have even torn ourselves away from 'the gayeties of the heart,' dance, ballad, glee, and all those other rare diversions, including bear-baiting, the stocks, and the public gibbet, created of our forefathers as a means of happiness and for the 'wonder and wealth of their souls.' With all deference to what has been deftly termed the 'æsthetic appeal of conservatism,' our town finds in the hoydenish radicalism of our age an abundant life in which we thus wickedly flourish in health of body, mind, and spirit. And if such life be not in consonance with the voice of the Almighty it is at least in harmony with the Psalmist's wholesome spirit of youth:

Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for ever

more.

THE WORLD AND THE BLIND MAN

BY CHARLES MAGEE ADAMS

THIS whole attitude of mind we call civilization or culture depends peculiarly on a delicate balance between the contrasting mental activities, thought and emotion; and it proves exceedingly difficult to approach any subject touching blindness without disturbing this balance, for the reason that emotion has always been the preponderant reaction to blindness.

People can laugh at what happens to a deaf man, discuss the loss of an arm or paralysis with complete calm, yet the moment blindness is mentioned there is an instant and involuntary flux of emotions, such as pity and sympathy, that distorts the entire perspective. These emotions, although brought about by reasons somewhat obscure, are, nevertheless, universal, and color every concept of the blind held by the seeing. During this discussion it may therefore prove necessary to swing to the other extreme in order to restore the balance.

There has always been a particularly keen interest in the psychology of blindness, even before the general interest in psychology now so marked. The seeing are constantly asking questions covering every phase of it - and quite normally. Sight is such a universally used and useful sense that the loss of it would seem to bring about a psychological condition difficult to conceive. But two facts pertinent to an analysis of the subject are revealed by these questions: first, that in general the seeing believe (anyone who has read Dr. James H.

I

Robinson's The Mind in the Making will grasp the significance I am giving this word) that the psychology of the blind is something fundamentally different from that of the seeing; and second, they believe that the lack of sight is all but compensated for by an added keenness of remaining senses, new senses, and an increased richness of experience. These beliefs are not confined to people easily deluded on usual matters, moreover. They can be found in the most amazing quarters. In spite of this, the facts (having been blind nineteen years I feel fairly familiar with the facts) show that the psychology of the blind differs from that of the seeing only in that the blind do not see.

This is not intended as a paradox or an attempt to turn an epigram. It is a proposition of basic importance, and the only starting-point from which the subject can be properly approached. The psychology of the blind is neither irrevocably removed from that of the seeing nor all but identical with it through some compensating means. It is simply the full psychology of normality with such changes and deficiencies as are brought about by the lack of sight. The blind have no power or sense not possessed by the seeing, not even an increased keenness of the remaining senses; merely a subtraction of sight with a somewhat better utilization and development of the four other senses to meet conditions.

A peculiar fact in connection with

this last has been responsible for much of the confusion, apparently. The chief reason the blind display a marked superiority over the seeing in the other senses, particularly hearing and touch, is that the seeing persist in concentrating on sight regardless of conditions. If a man is awakened in the night he tries to see what has awakened him, no matter if the room be inky dark. Sight is always the most important sense and the one called on first. So, even when he is blindfolded for comparative tests, the seeing man finds it extremely difficult to shift the focus of attention from sight to these other senses. Paradoxically enough, therefore, the reason a blind man utilizes these senses to a greater extent is because he has given up this natural attempt to see, which in many cases requires a long time, particularly if sight fails gradually, since it is for the most part an unconscious process linked up with how completely blindness is accepted as a fact.

It must not be forgotten too that there are only four remaining senses, for this has some widely ramified consequences. First, it means that the blind are confronted with a constant twenty per cent deficiency in received impressions, the significance of which I hope to make clear; and secondly, it precipitates an entire new sense-coördination. Normally we do not realize our senses are coördinated until possibly a cold reminds us how heavily taste depends on smell. Taking a sense as important as sight out of circuit necessarily forces some vastly more far-reaching readjustments. But perhaps the best way to make this as well as these other basic considerations clear is to begin with hearing.

II

Hearing is the first sense the blind turn to in the course of reorientation; the one that responds most easily to de

velopment; the one which proves, ultimately, the most useful. The seeing call on it for a wide range of uses in normal intercourse and therefore not so many additional mechanics need be provided as in the case of touch. But the blind merely develop the possibilities of hearing to their logical limits instead of being endowed with any increased sensitiveness.

I can best demonstrate this by two seeing friends of mine. One, an electrical engineer, can pick out and interpret in the hum of a turbogenerator a whole series of sounds of which I am not even aware; the other, an automotive engineer, can do the same with the engine of

passing car. They have merely developed their hearing to be of particular service to them in their professions, in the same way in which the blind develop their hearing to be of particular service to them in meeting the conditions imposed by lack of sight.

Sound reflection is a typical example. Whenever a sound impinges on a flat vertical surface of any appreciable area it is reflected much the same as light not echoed. An echo is also a reflection, but of a pronounced type; but the sort of reflection to which I refer takes place at distances shorter than necessary for an echo, and results in merely the addition to the original sound of a characteristic quality that could probably be classified as an overtone. Poles, trees, walls, buildings, cars, any fairly flat, fairly vertical, good-sized surface, will produce this effect. The seeing rarely, if ever, are aware of it, of course. They do not need to be. But the blind not only are aware of it but make thoroughly practical use of it for such everyday purposes as locating objects, or finding, for example, the gaps in a long line of parked cars. When a blind man taps his walking-stick on the pavement or shuffles his feet he is more often causing sounds which can be reflected

than trying to determine his location fort that is by no means small and by touch.

This utilization of one of hearing's possibilities generally wasted is alone responsible for the sixth-sense myth, and only one of the several ways in which this sense when developed serves the blind. But hearing also has two decided limitations particularly significant. In the first place it is a far less selective sense than sight.

Sight impressions are received from cnly one general direction and any object in this direction can be brought into focus so sharply that practically nothing else can be seen, merely by the expenditure of what is for the most part a muscular effort. But the case of hearing is quite different. Sound impressions from every point within audible range are received without any considerable variation due to direction, and each is heard. The slam of a door, voices in the street, a train whistle, a motor horn, register as vividly and definitely as piano music, and the only reason the music is heard and these other sounds apparently are not is that a more or less unconscious effort of attention has 'tuned' them out and let through the music.

I doubt if the seeing grasp what this means to the blind, because they depend on sight as an aid to hearing far more heavily than they realize. Lipreading, for example, bears much of the burden of conversational reception, as the simple experiment of holding the lips motionless will prove. But to the blind hearing is like a radio set which permits all stations to be heard simultaneously and leaves it to the listener to concentrate on the one he wants, which means a tremendous demand on attention. In the city streets with their roar and rattle of traffic, or even at small social gatherings, the 'tuning in' of a particular voice and the 'tuning out' of all other sounds require a constant ef

which makes for a high rate of fatigue.

This is further aggravated by hearing's second limitation. The auditory nerves are considerably smaller than the optical the fact behind the frequently encountered statement that things seen are more vivid than things heard. To the blind this of course has a special significance. It means that the sense which must handle the great bulk of received impressions can transmit less of them to the brain than the sense which handles the bulk for the seeing, or, in engineering terms, that the inputoutput efficiency of hearing is less than that of sight. So the result is that if an event can be translated equally well into terms of sight and sound the blind will not receive as vivid an impression of it as the seeing, and also that the rate of fatigue is increased.

This has not been generally recognized. A seeing person who has been reading or drawing or doing other work requiring high visual concentration for a long time finds not so much his eyes themselves as his whole optical mechanism is tired; and when a blind man has been listening intently for a long time he experiences much the same sort of fatigue. Not that his ears are tired, but his entire auditory mechanism is, even more so than the other's optical mechanism, because of the lower efficiency and the added work thrown on it. Any familiar sound like the purr of a car's motor, music, or a voice reading, will produce this result if continued too. long and, if carried further, it will bring on a nervous exhaustion that can be corrected only by quiet or sleep. The fact that the seeing have another major sense they can turn to also goes far toward relieving them of this experience. After a concert, for example, when fatigue might normally appear, they can shift the bulk of attention to seeing, giving the auditory mechanism an op

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