The Understanding of Witnesses and the Imagination. Regarding what people hear when they are expecting an answer, my parrot has taught me a great deal. This very clever and accomplished creature is distinguished by its ability to speak very distinctly, to imitate cries of certain animals, and to say many things, as, for example, " good morning " and " good evening," always at the right time. This gives certain simple folks the impression that they often hear what is really quite impossible. For example, a workman was busy one day in the room, and having been twice wished " good morning " by the parrot, at length returned the greeting ; whereupon the parrot is credited with having replied : " It is well that you reply at last ! " The bird certainly said something, and it would be interesting to know what the man mistook for the above reply.
A servant knowing that we were about to set out on a vacation trip, and that the bird was to be put into a box and taken along, addressed these words to it : " Poor fellow, now you will be packed up again ; " whereupon the parrot, according to the report of the servant, replied : " Yes, indeed, we set out day after tomorrow." The bird must of course have made nobody knows what other remark.
It is not to be supposed in either case that the people concerned intended to report what was untrue. They knew that the bird was able to accomplish feats, and now they assumed that it had made the appropriate reply in an astonishing fashion. They failed to correct the impression because they did not know how far the performances of a parrot can go ; they unconsciously corrected what they had understood imperfectly into that which conveyed an appropriate meaning, and thus the significant reply was supposed to have been actually heard.
A parallel criminal case is that of some players at nine-pins, who called to a passer-by to join them, as they needed an " even number." The latter, however, offered no reply, but passed on, whereupon the players called him names for his rudeness, when " he turned about and poured a perfect flood of abuse upon the players," who ran after him and administered a drubbing to him. It afterward transpired that the unfortunate individual was a deafmute, who neither heard the invitation to join in the game, nor the taunting words of the players, nor was able in return to use abusive language himself.
The psychological explanation is here, as in the stories of the parrot and in a thousand other cases, the same : one is expecting a given occurrence, and if it does not take place, one nevertheless believes that it does occur. Thus, in the last-mentioned case : the players have insulted the stranger ; ordinarily a man who is insulted replies with insults ; therefore the players not merely assumed, but were quite convinced, as were also the witnesses who appeared in court, that the man had insulted them. In the same way in the case of the parrot : people know that the bird is able to return proper answers to questions with which it has been drilled ; but how far the powers of the creature can go uneducated people do not know, and therefore they assume that it can give an answer to other simple questions ; and if the parrot makes any reply at all to a question or an expression, people hear in it that which they suppose to be the correct answer.
In the case cited the error was detected by the circumstance that the man accused of using insulting words was a deafmute, and that it is impossible that a bird can have spoken as the people maintained. In how many thousand other cases do we accept testimony as creditable, merely because the thing asserted is possible, and because nothing happens to be known to disprove the correctness of the assertion? HANS GROSZ, " Das Verstehen der Zeugen und die Einbildung," in Archiv für Kriminai-Anthropologie und Kriminalistik, April 7, 1904.
E. B. W.
Trusts and Trade Unions.—Although the successive rising upon our indus- trial horizon, first, of combinations of labor, and, more recently, of combinations of capital, has attracted widespread and serious attention, nevertheless the relations between the trusts and the unions have not hitherto been adequately investigated. Although at first it seemed likely that the new capitalistic combi- nations would provoke the bitter hostility of the trade unions, yet, as time passed,
