obtuse that some of the more idiotic seem hardly to know what it is.
In their dull lives, such pain as can be excited in them may
literally be accepted with a welcome surprise. During a visit to
Earlswood Asylum I saw two boys whose toe-nails had grown into the
flesh and had been excised by the surgeon. This is a horrible
torture to ordinary persons, but the idiot lads were said to have
shown no distress during the operation; it was not necessary to hold
them, and they looked rather interested at what was being done.
[1] I also saw a boy with the scar of a severe wound on his wrist;
the story being that he had first burned himself slightly by accident,
and, liking the keenness of the new sensation, he took the next
opportunity of repeating the experience, but, idiot-like, he overdid
it.

The trials I have as yet made on the sensitivity of different
persons confirms the reasonable expectation that it would on the
whole be highest among the intellectually ablest. At first, owing to
my confusing the quality of which I am speaking with that of nervous
irritability, I fancied that women of delicate nerves who are
distressed by noise, sunshine, etc., would have acute powers of
discrimination. But this I found not to be the case. In morbidly
sensitive persons both pain and sensation are induced by lower
stimuli than in the healthy, but the number of just perceptible
grades of sensation between them is not necessarily different.

I found as a rule that men have more delicate powers of
discrimination than women, and the business experience of life seems
to confirm this view. The tuners of pianofortes are men, and so I
understand are the tasters of tea and wine, the sorters of wool, and
the like. These latter occupations are well salaried, because it is