The book of wonders : $b gives plain and simple answers to the thousands of everyday questions that are asked and which all should be able to, but cannot answer...
Science
The book of wonders : $b gives plain and simple answers to the thousands of everyday questions that are asked and which all should be able to, but cannot answer...
Curiosities and wonders; Encyclopedias and dictionaries; Questions and answers; Science -- Miscellanea; Technology -- Miscellanea
When you are thinking you are really trying to call upon memory to
help you. You know the thought of one thing calls up another, and this
leads to something else. This association of ideas is the faculty which
enables us to think consecutively and accurately. It is the business of
the mind to receive the sensations that enter it and arrange them in
their proper places. That memory of past sensations is the important
part of thinking, is proven by the fact that when we have forgotten a
thing we are unable to think what it was.
Can Animals Think?
For this reason if animals have memory they should be able to think. It
is now believed that many animals have to a certain extent the power to
remember.
A dog will recognize his master even though he has not seen him for
years. We might think he does this by his highly developed power of
smell, but if his master has come from a direction opposite to that
from which the dog first sees him, he could not have tracked him by his
smell. A dog will recognize his master from quite a distance, so he
must have to a certain extent the ability to remember or the power of
association of ideas, which amounts to the same thing. Again, a horse
that once belonged to the fire department, even though now hitched to a
milk wagon, will have the impulse to run to the fire when he hears the
fire gong. And an old war horse will prick up his ears as he used to
when he hears the bugle call.
Why Do I Sneeze?
You sneeze sometimes when you look up at the sun or at a bright light.
There does not seem to be any real good explanation of why looking at a
bright light should make you sneeze. It is due to the connection there
is between the nerves of the eyes and the nose. You generally blink if
you look at a bright light suddenly, and the blinking process stirs the
nerves inside of the nose to make you sneeze.
You know, of course, that the start of the sneeze is inside of your
nose. The nose is, besides being the organ of smell, the channel
through which we take air into the lungs, when we breathe properly.
The nose is lined with membranes, back of which are a net of very
small nerves which are extremely sensitive. The membranes are placed
there to catch and hold the impure particles of matter which come into
the nose when we take in a breath of air, and sneezing is only one
effective way of cleaning out the nose. It is brought on only when some
particularly difficult job of nose-cleaning has to be done. Pepper up
the nose will make you sneeze quickly, because pepper produces a very
great irritation inside the nose, and the nose goes to work at once to
get rid of it in the quickest possible manner as soon as the pepper
comes in. Other things have the same effect. Sometimes a cold in the
head causes you to sneeze. The sneeze in that event is merely nature’s
effort to clean out the nose when other efforts have failed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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