We inherit our language from barbarous ancestors, and it shows
traces of its origin in the imperfect ways by which grades of
difference admit of being expressed. Suppose a pedestrian is asked
whether the knapsack on his back feels heavy. He cannot find a reply
in two words that cover more varieties than (1) very heavy, (2)
rather heavy, (3) moderate, (4) rather light, (5) very light. I once
took considerable pains in the attempt to draw up verbal scales of
more than five orders of magnitude, using those expressions only
that every cultivated person would understand in the same sense; but
I did not succeed. A series that satisfied one person was not
interpreted in the same sense by another.

The general intention of this chapter has been to show that a
delicate power of sense discrimination is an attribute of a high race,
and that it has not the drawback of being necessarily associated
with nervous irritability.




SEQUENCE OF TEST WEIGHTS.

I will now describe an apparatus I have constructed to test the
delicacy with which weights may be discriminated by handling them. I
do so because the principle on which it is based may be adopted in
apparatus for testing other senses, and its description and the
conditions of its use will illustrate the desiderata and
difficulties of all such investigations.

A series of test weights is a simple enough idea--the difficulty