ad first burned himself slightly by accident,
and, liking the keenness of the new sensation, he took the next
opportunity of repeating the experience, but, idiot-like, he overdid
it.

The trials I have as yet made on the sensitivity of different
persons confirms the reasonable expectation that it would on the
whole be highest among the intellectually ablest. At first, owing to
my confusing the quality of which I am speaking with that of nervous
irritability, I fancied that women of delicate nerves who are
distressed by noise, sunshine, etc., would have acute powers of
discrimination. But this I found not to be the case. In morbidly
sensitive persons both pain and sensation are induced by lower
stimuli than in the healthy, but the number of just perceptible
grades of sensation between them is not necessarily different.

I found as a rule that men have more delicate powers of
discrimination than women, and the business experience of life seems
to confirm this view. The tuners of pianofortes are men, and so I
understand are the tasters of tea and wine, the sorters of wool, and
the like. These latter occupations are well salaried, because it is
of the first moment to the merchant that he should be rightly advised
on the real value of what he is about to purchase or to sell. If the
sensitivity of women were superior to that of men, the self-interest
of merchants would lead to their being [3] always employed; but as
the reverse is the case, the opposite supposition is likely to be
the true one.

[Footnote 3: See "Remarks on Idiocy," by E.W. Graham, M. D.,
_Medical Journal_, January 16, 1875.]

Ladies rarely distinguish the merits of wine at the dinner-table,
and though custom allows them to preside at the breakfast-table, men
think them on the whole to be far from successful makers of tea and
coffee.

Blind persons are reputed to have acquired in compensation for the
loss of their eyesight an increased acuteness in their other senses;
I was therefore curious to make some trials with my test apparatus,
which I will describe in the next chapter. I was permitted to do so
on a number of boys at a large educational blind asylum, but found
that, although they were anxious to do their best, their performances
were by no means superior to those of other boys. It so happened
that the blind lads who showed the most delicacy of touch and won
the little prizes I offered to excite emulation, barely reached the
mediocrity of the va