Arizona republican., 1899-08-23
EYES MAY DECEIVE YOU
Incidents Show How Difficult Ii Is
 tO Put Confidence in Your Sight.

How many times. when your verac-
 ity has been questioned, have you
 clenched an argument by saying: T
 can surely believe my own eyes?
 The words are always on somebody's
 lips, yet the are by no means so con-
 vincing as would seem at first sight to i be the case. Read this paragraph
 over again; your eyes may be mislead- 1 ing you just now
 l Eighteen months ago . well known
 man died in London, and a few days
 after h;s dsG.h a London journalist declared that he had met the deceased
 in a London club and, moreover, as
 serted that he had spoken to him.
 Andrew Lang once met somebody
 in the street whom he took for well
 known university man. He spoke to him, shook hands with him and left him, and the next day he was startled to learn that at the moment he was speaking to the gentleman in the street
 his university friend was dying in a place more than a hundred miles away.
 There are some people of repute who declare that they have seen Parnell since his death. But these instances are eclipsed by the case of Cardinal Rohan, one of the central figures of the famous diamond necklace story in which Marie Antoine.-e was supposed to be concerned The cardinal was the dupe of an aristocratic 2dventur-
 ess, who declared that the queen wished him to obtain the necklace for her.
 To convince the cardinal the adven- turess informed him that the queen would meet him for few minutes at Q certain place at midnight, and lady resembling the queen in appearance was paid Eberally to play the part. The cardinal, who knew Marie Antoin- cite we'll cOnversed with her for some minutes, when a fOcEstep was heard, and the mock queen hurried away. For weeks the cardinal believed that he had seen the queen.
 The explanation of this amazing story is, of course, that the cardinal had for days anticipated the meeting, and that the image of the queen had been all along in his mind It is quite possible for man to be So strongly impressed with some object th&% hIs imagination summons up 10 his sight scenes which do not in reality exist. An English explorer once named a range Of mountains which it was af- forwards found had no existence
 Do you still trust your own eyes, and think chem incapable of misleading you? Try simple experiment. Take a burning stick and ask a friend to turn it round and round in the air. l Your brain tells you that there is only | one spark, but your eyes see a circle i of fire as long as the stick goes ound | Yet he stick can only be ct one poir'. [ at once, and there is 10 circle Of light | at all
 The explanation is simple. When an i object is brought before you and taken away you retain the impression of it after it has been removed perhaps for a sixth of second; SC that the inn pTessiOn made at one point remains until the stick comes round to the same point again. But the eye cer- tainly misleads you, in that it makes you believe that something exists which does not really exist at all
 L. is doubtful if two verbatim reports of Q speech were ever exactly alike, and every journalist knows that two reporters frequently disagree as to . certain word used by Q speaker.
 But I've kept my notes, and they can't Ee,'' says one, and, on referring 0 their note books. it transpirts that sach has written down a differer. word
 There was a remarkable instance Of his in the law courts the other day The lord chief justica-speaking, curi- ,Usly enough, of errors in the press made a little speech of such interest hat every newspaper in England re- , lOrted i... It was only eight lines in ength, but there were in London lone eight different versions.-Lon- on Mail