Sense of direction

Abstract

IN Mr. Darwin's article in NATURE for last week there is a passage about “the sense of direction being sometimes suddenly disarranged,” that brought to my mind assertions I had frequently heard made when travelling some years back in the wild parts of the State of Western Virginia. It is said that even the most experienced hunters of the forest-covered mountains in that unsettled region are liable to a kind of seizure; that they may “lose their head” all at once, and become convinced that they are going in quite the contrary direction to what they had intended, and that no reasoning nor pointing out of landmarks by their companions, nor observations of the position of the sun, can overcome this feeling; it is accompanied by great nervousness and a general sense of dismay and “upset;” the nervousness comes after the seizure, and is not the cause of it. I was present in a company of hunters when a tale of this “getting turned round” was told as a good joke against one of the party—a Nimrod of renown—the leading features of which he was reluctantly obliged to confess to the truth of, while denying some minor points that had been added to embellish it, as making him more ridiculous than he was: it would take up too much of your space to tell the particulars of the story. The feeling is described as sometimes ceasing suddenly, and sometimes wearing away gradually. Would it not be strange if it should appear that there is a “sense of direction” other than an acquired sense of direction the result of unconscious observation, and that some animals possessed the first in a pre-eminent degree? The wonderful faculty hunters possess of finding their way through immense mountainous tracts so thickly wooded that one cannot see farther than a few yards at a time, may perhaps be accounted for by this power of unconscious observation alone; but is it so easy to account for a sudden derangement of the sense of direction, and the peculiar distress it occasions, even when there is no ground for alarm on the score of safety? This appears a kind of converse of the instance Mr. Darwin gives of the case of old persons losing their way.