” It is difficult and painful for the ear to listen to anything new; we hear strange music badly.

When we hear another language spoken, we involuntarily attempt to form the sounds into words with which we are more familiar and conversant — it was thus, for example, that the Germans modified the spoken word ARCUBALISTA into ARMBRUST (cross-bow). Our senses are also hostile and averse to the new; and generally, even in the “simplest” processes of sensation, the emotions DOMINATE — such as fear, love, hatred, and the passive emotion of indolence. — As little as a reader nowadays reads all the single words (not to speak of syllables) of a page — he rather takes about five out of every twenty words at random, and “guesses” the probably appropriate sense to