rroneous, too. But this is after all a
question of naked facts, and only the scientific examination can
decide.

The problem might be approached from various sides. It was only meant
as a first effort when I carried on the following experiment: I had a
portfolio with twenty-four large bristol-board cards of the size of
the _Saturday Evening Post_. On eight of those cards I had pasted four
different advertisements, each filling a fourth of a page. On some
pages every one of the four advertisements took one of four whole
columns; in other cases the page was divided into an upper and lower,
right and left part. All the advertisements were cut from magazines,
and in all the name of the firm and the object to be sold could be
easily recognized. On the sixteen other pages the arrangement was
different. There only two fourths of the page were filled by two
advertisements; the other two fourths contained funny pictures with a
few words below. These pictures were cut from comic papers. All the
pictures were of such a kind that they slightly attracted the
attention by their amusing content or by the cleverness of the
drawing, but never demanded any careful inspection or any delay by the
reading of the text. This, in most cases, consisted of a few title
words like "The Widow's Might," "Pause, father, is that whip
sterilized?" or similar easily grasped descriptions of the story in
the picture. Even where the text took two lines, it was more easy to
apperceive the picture and its description than the essentials of the
often rather chaotic advertisements. By this arrangement we evidently
had thirty-two advertisements on the eight pages which contained
nothing else, and thirty-two other advertisements on the sixteen pages
which contained half propaganda and half pictures with text. All this
material was used as a basis for the following test, in which
forty-seven adult persons participated. All were members of advanced
psychological courses, partly men, partly women. None of those engaged
in the experiment knew anything about the purpose beforehand. Thus
they had no theories, and I carefully avoided any suggestion which
might have drawn the attention in one or another direction.

Every one had to go through those twenty-four pages in twelve minutes,
devoting exactly thirty seconds to every page, and a signal marked the
time when he had to pass to the next. He was to give his attention to
the whole content of the page, and as both th