Another annual event is the lecture by Frederick Merk, Gurney Professor of History and Political Science, which has been dubbed Otter Catching by his students.

Merk gives the valuable for of the sea otter as a reason why white men wanted to open up the Oregon territory, and then procedes to explain how the Indians used to catch this elusive creature.

A band of them in their kayaks, he says, would form a circle about the sleeping otter, and shout and beat the water with their paddles. The otter would awake, dive under, and the Indians would widen the circle. When the animal reappeared, they shouted again, under went the otter, and the Indians closed in once more.

This went on, Merk explains, until the otter was so tired, he could barely dive, when all the Indians shot arrows at him. The fur pelt went to the man whose arrow lodged closest to the otter's ear.

Edwin G. Boring, professor of Psychology, uses a somewhat different method to illustrate the main idea in his course, Psychology 1, at the beginning of his first lecture every year.

Philosophers, he asserts, allege that human thought in action is free. He warns the class that they are about is undergo an experience they cannot escape. With this he pulls out a gun and fires it.

"Everyone jumps," claims Boring.

Then he tells them not to be startled because he is going to do it again. He advises the students to think of something else. He fires the gun a second time, and again claims that everyone in the class jumps.

Illustration of Weakness

To further illustrate the weakness of most people's power of concentrates, Boring asks the class to count the number of clicks ticked off by a machine. He starts the machine, then tries to distract students by miscounting with them, He turns off the device and asks for the total. Most people offer the wrong number, Boring says.

Those that count correctly, he emphasizes, experience a "fierce muscular exortion." It's easier to be led astray, he concludes.

In a Social Relations 1a annual talk, Gordon W. Allport '19, professor of Psychology, specializes on thousands of people who were led astray. For one hour, he plays a recording of Orson Welles' famous 1989 broadcast "War Between the Worlds", which simulated as on-the-spot news story of the invasion of Earth by Mars. Part of the next hour he spends explaining why the program caused panic, riots, and evacuation of cities when first heard in this country as that October night.

Rale of Rumor

He illustrates the part rumor had is exaggerating the story to even more enormous proportions. Allport says that he unstable conditions of the country and world affairs at the time might have had something to do with it.

But he ends by relating the story of a worse panic which occurred in Equador when the same record was played over the air there in 1949, a year of comparative peace, leaving his class with a puzzle and vague promise of an answer before the course is finished.