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ON SOME MINOR PSYCHOLOGICAL INTERFERENCES. 87 the five cases in the preceding paragraph, where the man's work upon the various series of cages prefigures the opera- tion of continuous writing, case (5), however, being an exceptional, though closely related one, in which the per- turbing cause is partly extraneous to the current train of ideas. With this introduction I proceed to classify the actually occurring errors in the same order and under the same numbers as the above hypothetical ones ; and only further premise that these five cases include all (though I will not quote all) the instances of misspelling in the answers of the candidates referred to except perhaps half a dozen detached oversights. (1) The process under this head may be called Prolepsis, or otherwise, "Assimilation from ahead". Here the mind runs on, for an instant, in advance of the fingers ; and a part, or (rarely) the whole, of a later word or syllable comes within consciousness while the pen is still at work upon an earlier word or syllable : the effect is that a syllable or letter of the later is substituted for a syllable or letter of the earlier, or is added to the earlier, but is also repeated in its proper place. Hence (i.) a letter or syllable appears as if assimilated to a coming one ; e.g. : Sfcefcel for shekel ; Spooled for stooped ; Quaiiiy for quality ; and Correiaiive for correlative; so also Prownownce (scepe *) ; Prownown (spe) ; Introduce ; Pherao- mena ; Ta.blena.de ; a Disjunction conjunction, for disjunctive ; and others similar : in ~NLethaphoi we have a curious partial assimilation ; (ii.) a letter is introduced, or a letter or syllable is added, resembling a following one (but the addi- tions were confined entirely to imitations of inflexional endings) ; e.g. : PZaimistry ; Mordern ; And addition was made ; Euphonies changes ; Plurals forms are . . . ; Others writers; A Nound preceded by . . . ; The general Buled is followed; "Metaphor" is the termed applied . . .; and many more. (2) The next process may be called Metapedesis, or " Over- leaping". It is really a modification of (1): attention is again projected, so to say, ahead of the fingers ; but, instead of assimilating a preceding letter or syllable to a following one, the mind completely loses consciousness of the former, and the pen omits it. This kind of perturbation mostly affects whole syllables, and generally in those words which properly show two successive syllables of the same or a similar form ; as in Preced (bis) for preceded ; Possive (bis) for 1 By sxpe, or bis, I mean that the mis-spelling occurred many times, or twice, in different Answer-books, not in the same.