| Show A CUT CHAT WITH A MIND BUILDER I 1 washington D C oct 3 1897 I 1 looked through a microscope this afternoon which I 1 am told will probably p z revolutionize our knowledge of the f material world it has been invented tirl ng the present month its anven lat ta professor E L gates the diorec pastor SW of the laboratory of psychology of this city this new ment professor gates says ex eds the power of the best present crosscope cro scope as much as the present aro cope scope exceeds the power of the nan eye it will magnify an article ee million times its dl di mater and inventor tells me that he believes win be able through it to photo h images which are one hundred a times the diameter of the 61 object abject these figures are so that it is impossible for the com mind to grasp them they depre a success beyond the wildest and they w 1 of the world of scientific open en a new object which was placed in the cope for me to see was a diatom of the smallest living beings that be seen geen with a microscope SS atoms mo are invisible to the naked fe professor gates tells me that r are so small that the pinhead of arth th in which they live often has enany as two million diatoms in it out a dozen of these little things 1 in a slide as big g silver five cent piece I 1 first led at them through a micro we w which magnified twenty through this they ap eed like little bits of dust or straw A the side was placed in what the esser told me was the most power i mw known to man this 0 magnified ten thousand diameters the e r magnification was so great that ore one diatoms was wa a all we could see s now in the 8 shape hape of an clipse gt riSh jl ajene line running through the center fi A with a texture which made me k of that of the finest silk hand chief lef it might have been made of most minute scales but it looked ilk like fine leavi weaving ng than anything then the new microscope was and the magnification was now reat sat that I 1 could only see one of little scale I 1 could see that it hexagonal in shape with a cinter center there were lines around es and prof gates said that padding I 1 rag a higher objective one of lines would take up the whole ce of the microscope and that if tried ed to see the whole image it t be so BO magnified that for the tion of a single diatom you il need all out of doors for a L J looked prof alwes Qt otes said you ge third man JA n the world who kever brer fleen a diatom magnified to ia extent I 1 have here used one of aster objectives you will i atiat I 1 have two microscopes together you can note the ra a 0 the objectives ives and it will surprise scientists if you tell them that with a fourteen millimeter beck objective and a one sixth bousch and lamb objective you saw the hexagonal opening of the diatom known as angula tum now did I 1 use a one twelfth inch objective for my first microscope we could only see the line about the opening which would be enormously magnified what is the chief element of the invention ven tion prof gates I 1 asked it is more of a discovery than an invention was the reply you see the microscopes up to the present time have been limited to ten thousand diameters we could enlarge the photographs of images produced by such microscopes but the action of the light on the sensitive plate is such that when lines are very close together the light affects the chemicals on the plate so that they become one so in the enlarged photograph you never have any more than is seen in first image produced by the microscope and you may have less I 1 conceived the idea of placing a second microscope in the real image produced by the first microscope this I 1 do here it re magnifies the image so that I 1 get the results which I 1 have shown you the mechanism however has to be very carefully made and the light which must come from the original object is so reduced that in getting the first results from my three million diameter experiment I 1 remained in my dark room with the microscope for two hours to get my eyes in the proper condition to see the results you see in using a ten thousand diameter microscope the image produced by it has only one one hundredth millionth part as much light as that which falls on the original object when you try to get your light from a part of the image taking one three hundredth part of it you get only one thirty billionth of the light which falls on the original object this light is so 80 little that it would filter through the best camera made and it is only by means of my dark room that I 1 will be able to do the photographing of such results to make the right kind of a microscope for the best work along these lines would cost about but it would add enormously scientific knowledge of the world and would enable us to make as great an advance over our present knowledge as the microscope did over the unaided human eye As we looked through the microscope prof gates told me how he had come to make the discovery his ideas are so striking and unusual that I 1 almost despair of giving them to the public he has a set of entirely new theories as to the mind many of which he has gotten through a long series of experiments upon himself and animals carried on through a series of years he claims that one can build up and add to his brain that he can go through a process of training that will make every man to a certain extent an inventor and that his new microscope is one of hundreds of other inventions which he has produced through a fixed course of mind building edison and tesla are spending thousands of dollars in experiments to discover and apply the properties of matter prof gates has a laboratory devoted to experimenting peri upon and discovering the properties of the mind he has I 1 am told an endowment which gives him about 2000 a month to be used in such experiments with this money he has purchased the finest instruments known to man he has invented others and he to is carrying on some of the queerest experiments peri ments ever attempted by a scientific investigator I 1 was much interested in the story of how he first came to the conclusion that our brains could be added to and built up when he was a boy hi he realized that the mind was the most important thing in the universe at the age of fourteen he says he began to experiment won apon himself por for two years he kept a record of all that he saw felt or did he had a book in which he recorded four times each day just what the climatic and other conditions about him were in another column he put down his physical ibal edn condition stating just how he be felt measuring just how much he ate and in short all that he did that would affect his physical state in the third column he recorded his mental condl condi tlona tiong at the end of two years he went over the record and generalized it he found that under certain conditions his brain was more active than under others that he could write better at such times and that his inventive faculties were more active after this he worked only under such conditions and found that he could produce twelve times asgood as god results as before he soon began to see that his work was getting better and better and later on began a systematic study of brain development one of his first experiments was as to ue the building the brain of a dog said Sald ke hb 1 I wanted to see what effect mental activity has upon the brain and it struck me that if I 1 could hakea certain number of puppies and keep them from their birth in absolute darkness and at the same time take another ewt set which should be trained in seeing and have plenty of light that upon botn comparing the brains of the two I 1 ewd tell whether the use of the seeing power had changed them this I 1 did I 1 took seven shepherd puppies and kept them in a room until they thel were nine months old the room was was completely dark I 1 had triple doors so that the mother could go in and out without allowing the light to enter the room when the front door was open and the mother was let in the doors were closed behind and she was allowed to remain there some mm utes then the second door wati opened and she ibe was kept there a few minutes and then allowed to go into the room where her children were I 1 kept the puppies there for nine months without light and then killed them thelby by the use of chloroform I 1 took out their brains eyes and spinal chords and put them aside for microscopic and chemical examination at the a same ame time I 1 had another group of puppies which I 1 allowed to lead the life of the ordinary dog giving them no special attention I 1 chloroformed chloro formed them when they were nine months old and preserved their brains for examination in addition to these two I 1 had a third group of the same kind of puppies which I 1 put through a course of training in seeing I 1 had one of the rooms of mv laboratory covered with squares of metal each square being insulated from the other to some of the squares I 1 attached an electric battery and arranged them so that the moment a dog touched one of them he would receive a shock these squares had one color other squares which were not affected by the electricity had another color colok I 1 soon taught the dogs to discriminate between the squares by the colors ana ancen in this way actually taught them to know colors for instance I 1 had one pan or pen the bottom of which was covered with tin painted white around this I 1 ran a black border of metal which was connected with the battery after a few days you could not get the dogs to touch that border or anything black but you might lay a white strip across the black and they would walk over it I 1 also taught them colors by feeding them placing the meat under pans of a certain color r scattered about among pans of other colors all of the pans were rubbed with meat first to prevent the dogs from picking out those with the meat under them by the sense of smell the dogs would go to the right colored pans every time after a while I 1 changed the meats indifferent io to different colored pans on different mornings the dogs soon learned to recognize the change and there was one of the dogs who would turn over all the pans until he came to the first one having meat in it and after that he would turn over only pans of that color the dogs in fact learned to surpass many of our artists in their discrimination of colors they could distinguish seven shades of red and about eight ot of green well at the end of nine months I 1 killed this set of dogs and then compared the brains of the three sets I 1 found that the dogs who had been kept in darkness had no brain cells in the seeing areas of their brains the dogs who had been al lowed to run about had well devel aped brain cells just as you will find in the ordinary dog of that age but I 1 also found that my puppies had a much greater number of such cells and that their cells were mote more highly developed I 1 found in short that by educating the doks dogs I 1 had added to their brains I 1 tried the same thing on other dogs as to hearing and also as to the training of the muscles by making the dogs produce certain leg motions and found that this produced similar results on the brain I 1 practiced similar experiments on monkeys and rabbits as to colors and I 1 made a large number of experiments upon guinea pigs running through several generations to see the effect of heredity upon brain development the result is that I 1 have no doubt but that man can not only develop the brains he has but that he can actually add to them and build up new brains along the lines as he desires have you evidence that any such work would really affect the brain of a human being yes I 1 have tested it in many ways 1 I have a baby for instance who will discriminate more than a hundred thousand different shades shade of color aud who s been specially trai in ing feeling andin and in other ways I 1 r believe that we have eight i senses you know instead of five we see we hear we smell we taste we touch we also have a sense of cold and a sense of heat and also a sense of muscular adion action all of these senses are based upon thought they are controlled by the mind the use of them acts upon the mind every time you use one of them a certain set of cells in the brain is changed and by their use you can build up a new set of brain cells unless all of these senses are used your brain will be unevenly developed and some parts of it will not be developed at all in training my child I 1 tried to make him use all of his senses I 1 taught him the sense of heat and cold by the use of hot and cold baths graduated from cool to warm I 1 also used rubber gloves connected with the water supply and as a result of this I 1 believe his brain will be stored with memories of all the degrees of heat and cold he is likely to have in life and I 1 think he will be able to endure the diff differences er of temperature he is now two and a half years old and he has never been sick but once and then he had the measles prof gates showed me the boxes or blocks with which he taught his child the different geometrical shapes he has whistles with which he taught him sound so that he can now distinguish between scores of different pitches he has bottles containing different liquids each having a different smell these bottles number fifteen hundred so that he may really be said to have fifteen hundred different smells bottled up his baby at ten months could distinguish fifty different tastes and thirty different smells while we were talking the baby came into the laboratory with his nurse he looked to me as happy and healthy as any child could be prof gates tells me that his experiments in teaching him never last more than five minutes at a time and that the child really likes them he also said that a child who had been trained for six weeks after birth in the excessive use of the heat and cold senses was found after dying of a scarlet arc fever to have in the temperature areas of the brain more than twenty four times the average number of cells I 1 asked prof gates when brain building should begin he replied that it should really begin in the father and mother before the child was born and that the child within a few weeks after birth should begin its brain development prof gates says that his experiments show that men can really work their brains ovar over and make them new they can rebuild them and can make them do original thinking for them along any line that they choose I 1 had my photographer with me during my call at the laboratory prof gates pointed to him and said 1 I can take that man and within a year if he will follow out my directions I 1 can have him make new discoveries co and inventors invent ons in photography I 1 would first teach him how to control his mind and how to use it in the director dir ecton of his work I 1 would gradually lead him to original thinking invention inVent lon and discovery I 1 would have him take the sum of accurate human knowledge in photography and would teach him how toworu from that on through to new ideas he would first exercise every one of ills his thirty or forty mental functions each proposition of the science this would keep each faculty active fo for r a certain number of hours every day the parts of his brain which he needed ed to deal with the subject would grow his subconscious sub conscious ful functions actions would become stimulated emd and ate new ideas would dawn upon him I 1 have found that six months practice along the lines which I 1 lay down usually quadruples the mental capacity ofa of a man and more mare than quadruples the number of ideas gained each day of course such ideas have to be tested by observation and experiment as an to their correctness take this microscope for instance the wonderful thing about it is not the discovery but it is the art of mind using and mind building which I 1 have used which has resulted in the discovery 0 during the |
