This was exactly the scheme on which that marvel of the village had struck. He had forced on himself this artificial breaking of the attention, and had trained himself to have his eyes performing their work independent of the activity of the hands. My friend assures me that as soon as he had heard of the trick, there was no difficulty in his imitating it, and immediately the number of ears which he was able to husk in a given time was increased by 30 per cent. The mere immediate instinct would always keep the eye movement and the hand movements coupled together. A certain artificial effort is necessary to overcome this natural coördination. But if this secret scheme had been known to all the boys in the village, ten would have been able to perform what fifteen did. Of course this is an utterly trivial incident, and where my friend husked corn in his boyhood days, to-day probably the cornharvester is doing it more quickly anyhow. But as long as real scientific effort has not been applied toward examining the details, we have to rely on such occasional observations in order at first to establish the principle. Every one knows that just such illustrations might as well be taken from the picking of berries, in which the natural method is probably an absurd waste of energy, and yet which in itself seems so insignificant that up to present days no scientific efforts have been made to find out the ideal methods. Similar accidental observations are suggested by the well-known experiments with shovelling carried on in the interest of industry, where the shovelling of coal and of pig iron demanded a careful investigation into the best conditions for using the shovel. It was found that it is an unreasonable waste of energy to use the same size and form of tool for lifting the heavy and the light material. With the same size of shovel the iron will make such a heavy load that the energies are exhausted, and the coal will give such a light load that the energies are not sufficiently made use of. It became necessary to determine the ideal load with which the greatest amount of work with the slightest fatigue could be performed, and that demanded a much larger shovel for the light than for the heavy substance. Exactly this situation repeats itself with the spade of the farmer. The conditions are somewhat different, but the principle must be the same. Of course the farmer may use spades of different sizes, but he is far from bringing the product of spade surface and weight to a definite equation. Sometimes he wastes his energies and sometimes he exhausts them. But it is not only a question of the size of shovel or spade. The whole position of the body, the position of the hands, the direction of the attention, the rhythm of the movement, the pauses between the successive actions, the optical judgment as to the place where the spade ought to cut the ground, the distribution of energy, the respiration, and many similar parts of the total psychophysical