Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/799

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THE PROGRESS OF PSYCHOLOGY.
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The revenue from the exported fish is used for different public expenses, and among others for the improvement of local industries in general and the fisheries in particular. Thus, during the last three or four years, a very fine agricultural school, with a model farm, has been erected at a cost of more than one hundred thousand dollars. They have several scholarships in the leading universities of the empire, and maintain a very large high school. For the purpose of making improvements in local fisheries a person of suitable education and familiar with home fishery affairs is sent to foreign countries to study the different branches of fishing industry, including pisciculture. I have the honor of being charged with this task. Two years are spent in these studies in all places of fishing importance in the different countries of Europe and North America, and now I have completed them by getting information at the World's Fair.

The Ural Cossacks' community is represented, although not largely, at the World's Fair, in the Russian department in the Fishery Building, and I should be much pleased if the foregoing could call the attention of visitors to the peculiar fisheries of my fellow Cossacks.

At the same time I would like to give some idea of the home life of this strange race, who are known in foreign countries only as a semi-barbarous, warlike people on horseback with formidable lances, etc. The foregoing, I hope, will add something new to their characteristics.

THE PROGRESS OF PSYCHOLOGY.

By Prof. JAMES McKEEN CATTELL.

COLUMBIA COLLEGE.

FOUR hundred years ago it was possible for Columbus to discover a new world. The circle of the earth is long since complete, but in the presence of each man is an unexplored world—his own mind. There is no mental geography describing the contents of the mind, still less is there a mental mechanics demonstrating necessary relations of thought. Yet the mind is the beginning and the end of science. Physical science is possible because the mind observes and arranges, and physical science has worth because it satisfies mental needs. The mind being thus the center from which we start and to which we return, there is reason for wonder that we know so little concerning it. Each of the physical and biological sciences includes a large mass of facts admitted by all students, and many theories which by general consent are accepted as working hypotheses. In psychology, on the other hand, there seems to be no common