Initial Mistake Research Articles

The Smenovekhovtsy Movement as the First Historical Attempt to Reconcile the Reds and the Whites: Achievements and Failures

The history and results of the famous Smenovekhovtsy movement, which started with the Change of Signposts (Smena Vekh) publication in 1921, are observed. The paper states that the Smenovekhovtsy movement dropped off the field of public attention in the post-Soviet period, but now it is time to return to this phenomenon. The author considers the Smenovekhovtsy movement as the first historical attempt to reconcile the Reds and the Whites after the Civil War. From this point of view, the positive and negative sides of this movement are evaluated, as well as what lessons can be drawn from those events for today. The papers highlights the relevance and nonrandom popularity of the the Smenovekhovtsy movement’s ideas at the time of their very emergence. However, quite quickly this movement became extremely corrupt (messed up and fake) due to its leading participants. That way, the custommade nature, which it acquired quite soon, became obvious to many people. The Bolsheviks were not ready to make any serious compromises, except for tactical reasons — that was the initial mistake of the Smenovekhovtsy. The tragic fate of the leader of this movement Nikolay Ustryalov, and many other prominent participants was conditioned by the fact that their view and analysis did not involve the philosophical and metaphysical plane, being limited mainly to sociopolitical and economic reality. Therefore, their hopes for an early evolution of the regime did not come true. In case of such an ideocratic state as the USSR, it was essential to take into account both the philosophy of Marxism and its metaphysics. The historical results, which would allow to evaluate the Smenovekhovtsy movement, turned out to be twisted and ambiguous. It is impossible not to recognize the restoration of the state and the army, the international prestige of the USSR, which became the world’s leading power in the XX century. On the other hand, the Soviet great power ended with the collapse. The Smenovekhovtsy overestimated the state potential of Bolshevism. A take on the Soviet period of history, its pros and cons through the prism of the Smenovekhovtsy movement is quite useful. It is no coincidence that the features of historical Russia suddenly bled through the red contours of the USSR. This was exactly what the Smenovekhovtsy movement highly appreciated. But to what extent they bled through — this remains a subject for discussion until today.

No Need to Know It All: Implications of COVID‐19 for Corporate Communication Research

No Need to Know It All: Implications of COVID‐19 for Corporate Communication Research

Falsifying the Record: Entente Diplomacy and the Preparation of the Blue and Yellow Books on the War Crisis of 1914

Historians have long been aware of how a misleading error made in the compilation of the British Blue Book on the war crisis of 1914 left the Foreign Office open to German charges of doctoring its diplomatic record. But two volumes of previously uncited manuscript documents, still in the custody of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, reveal that the reluctance of British officials to rectify their initial mistake also contributed to the falsification of the analogous French Yellow Book. This paper suggests that the resulting Anglo-French collaboration both constrained and retarded the British government's more active engagement in the debate on the origins of the Great War.

Palmas - a história viva do cerrado

Em poucas cidades do Brasil a história é tão recente como em Palmas, confundindo passado e presente de uma maneira peculiar, onde a relação tempo-espaço ocorre de uma forma diferenciada, viva, dominada pela transformação rápida da paisagem natural e da conformação do cenário urbano. O que se vê em Palmas é a participação de cada cidadão nesta história, contada não somente por fatos e registros, mas pela apropriação cotidiana do espaço urbano. É a história da dominação sobre o espaço natural, principalmente dos equívocos iniciais desta relação, produzindo um contexto ambiental não condizente com a potencialidade da região. Este trabalho traça um panorama do desenvolvimento histórico da paisagem de Palmas, demonstrando a história de projetos de espaços livres no contexto da cidade.

Criminal Naivety: Blind Resistance and the Pain of Knowing in Chrétien De Troyes’s Conte Du Graal

CRIMINAL NAIVETY: BLIND RESISTANCE AND THE PAIN OF KNOWING IN CHRETIEN DE TROYES'S CONTE DU GRAAL Written between 1181 and 1185 for Chretien's patron, Philippe d'Alsace, Count of Flanders, Le Conte du Graal is Chretien de Troyes's final and most enigmatic work.1 In common with other heroes in Chretien's works, Perceval makes an initial mistake, the repercussions of which will shape the rest of the story. The Conte unfolds as a story of crime and punishment, quite complex in structure since the full extent of the crime committed will be revealed only at the end. Perceval is not a typical hero, however. Neither worldly nor learned, he displays in his behaviour early in the story that not only is he socially inept, but he is also unable to learn. Perceval's complete lack of social skills is a result ofthe strange education his mother gave him. She has instructed him on the values central to the Christian tradition, but at the same time has kept him in complete ignorance of all chivalric tradition. Perceval's naivety towards the culture of chivalry will quickly change into fascination as his ignorance is disrupted by a chance meeting with a group of knights whom he believes to be angels led by a single godlike figure. He resolves to leave his mother in order to pursue knighthood. Perceval's departure marks the space of his refusal to learn the lessons of his mother, a resistance that will call into question the very nature and foundation of her teaching. The mother places religion at the centre of her teachings so that it may take the place of another and actively repressed knowledge: the knowledge of a deadly chivalric glory. Although Perceval will show that he is sensitized to the existence of this repressed knowledge in his active refusal to let his mother speak, his resistance to it will consign him to a ceaseless repetition of his initial error. Perceval's journey leads him to the castle ofthe Fisher King, a place that will be transformed for him into the site of a trial in both senses of the term. Unbeknown to him, Perceval will be subjected to an epreuve, a test, which he will fail and for which he will be punished for the remainder of the narrative. Although the Fisher King's castle stands in the midst ofa terregaste, a devastated land, the king graciously welcomes Perceval, whom he invites to dine with him. During the dinner Perceval sees passing in front of him a servant carrying a lance that is bleeding from its point followed by two others carrying candleholders, then by two girls, one carrying a grail and the other a silver platter. The procession enters from one room, passes in front of them, and disappears into another room. This enigmatic scene has obvious Christian connotations and less obvious Jewish ones which David Berdah and Eugene Weinraub have pointed out.2 As to the Christian connotations, the bleeding lance serves as a reminder of the Lance of Longinus, the Roman centurion who pierced the side of Christ before 1 Chretiende Troyes,Le Contedu Graal, ed. by Charles Mela (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1990). Englishtranslations aremyownunlessotherwisenoted. 2 David Berdah,La Haggadah dePdque avec traduction etcommentaires enlanguefrancaise(Tunis : S.L. Editions,1957); Eugene Weinraub,Chretien's JewishGrail (Chapel Hill: Universityof NorthCarolinaPress,1976). Modern Language Review, 101(2006), 48-61 ? Modern Humanities Research Association 2006 ANN McCULLOUGH 49 converting to Christianity and dying a martyr. The lance evokes the agony of Christ, the shedding of his blood to redeem the sins of humanity. It is also a figure of mourning since it seems to 'cry' tears of blood. As for the grail, it is clearly marked as an enigmatic object: Quant ele fu leianz antree Atot lo graal qu'ele tint, Une si grant clartez i vint Qu'ausin perdirent les chandoilles Lor clarte comme les estoilles Qant li solaux luist o la lune. (11.3162-67) When she entered the room, With the grail she was holding, The room was filled with such a light That the candles lost their brilliance As do the stars when the sun...

Fill‐in and infill errors in order memory

Many current models of memory are specified with enough detail to make predictions about patterns of errors in memory tasks. However, there are often not enough empirical data available to test these predictions. We report two experiments that examine the relative frequency of fill‐in and infill errors. In immediate serial recall tasks, subjects sometimes incorrectly recall item N too soon, placing it in position N−1. The error of interest is which item is recalled after this initial mistake. A fill‐in error is the tendency to recall item N−1 next, whereas an infill error is the tendency to recall item N+1 next. Both experiments reveal more fill‐in than infill errors, not only overall but at each possible error location throughout the list. The overall ratio is approximately 2:1. We conclude that none of the currently existing models adequately accounts for fill‐in and infill errors.

Cosmetic Differences: The Changing Faces of England and France

Cosmetic Differences: The Changing Faces of England and France LYNN FESTA In his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), Shaftesbury invites us to imagine that "a native of Ethiopia were on a sudden transported into Europe and placed either at Paris or Venice at a time of Carnival, when the general face of mankind and almost every creature wore a mask." Under these circumstances, Shaftesbury notes, "it is probable he would for some time be at a stand before he discovered the cheat, not imagining that a whole people could be so fantastical as, upon agreement at an appointed time, to impose on one another by this universal confusion of characters and persons."1 The Europeans might laugh at the Ethiopian's simplicity in taking masks for faces, Shaftesbury notes, and once his eyes cleared and he recognized the true situation, the Ethiopian might join in the laughter. But all laughs here are not created equal, and the absurdly clad Europeans do not laugh best, "for," Shaftesbury reminds us, "he who laughs and is himself ridiculous bears a double share of ridicule."2 But Shaftesbury does not allow the Ethiopian to escape scot-free either, for the Ethiopian falls from one error into another. What if, Shaftesbury asks, 25 26 / FESTA in the transport of ridicule, our Ethiopian, having his head still running upon masks and knowing nothing of the fair complexion and common dress of the Europeans, should upon the sight of a natural face and habit, laugh just as heartily as before, would he not be in his turn become ridiculous, by carrying the jest too far, when by a silly presumption he took nature for mere art and mistook perhaps a man of sobriety and sense for one of those ridiculous mummers?3 In taking the joke too far, this improperly distanced spectator mistakes not art for life, but life for art. Shaftesbury's Ethiopian reveals how cultural blindness shapes and limits epistemological insight. The misleading frame created by the Carnival and the Ethiopian's (contrived) ignorance (he has never seen a white face) lead him to project his own experience of black faces onto the world as a whole: he renders the white face a mask in order to preserve a universal principle of sameness based on his own visage. Metaphorically speaking, Shaftesbury points out, the Ethiopian is quite right: "the general face of mankind" does wear a mask. But the seeming universality of disguise is itself deceptive. In our haste to peer beneath the mask, Shaftesbury warns, we may fail to recognize that sometimes a face is just a face. The failure to know that a mask is a mask (the Ethiopian's initial mistake) is an error as grave as the mistaking of a true face for a mask (his second mistake). Indeed, the one who takes face for mask is more ridiculous than the naive dupe who mistakes mask for face. For Shaftesbury, the task of the philosopher is not to unmask or see beneath the vizard, but rather to sort counterfeit from real face.4 Yet this distinction is by no means easy to discern. For how does one know when one has arrived at the true face? When does the presence or absence of color become a superadded layer, a mask?5 It is not, perhaps, a coincidence that Shaftesbury sends his Ethiopian to two cities, Paris and Venice, where, according to eighteenth-century observers, a semblance of carnival went on all year long in the lavishly made-up countenances of the women and, at times, the men.6 The broader questions Shaftesbury poses about the nature of masks are posed on a more banal register in a set of conundrums—aesthetic, philosophical, and, as I will argue below, national—unleashed by the use of cosmetics in the eighteenth century. "The French women," Ange Goudar's Chinese spy announces in 1765, "wear no veils, yet one part they carefully conceal, and that is their face. They cover themselves with a white mastich, extremely thin, and over it they lay on a red colour, with the help of a pencil. These Cosmetic Differences I 27 masks are so ingeniously made, as...

Facts, Law, and Policy: An Allocation-of-Powers Approach to Patent System Reform

The growing prominence of the patent system has revealed an institutional structure in need of repair. Legal scholars and commentators have identified and discussed some of the difficulties of the individual institutions within the patent system. But they have not incorporated into their analyses a recognition of all of the relevant institutions and their highly interdependent roles. Because of this interdependence, patent reform requires multi-institutional analysis. This Article argues that the ostensibly discrete problems of our patent institutions stem from an initial mistake in institutional design. This mistake was made in 1982, when Congress implemented patent reform by attempting to concentrate expertise at the appellate level. Congress focused on the appellate courts even though the patent questions that require narrowly focused expertise are largely questions of fact, not law or policy. Multi-institutional reform must therefore focus on remedying the system's substantial deficiencies in the areas of both fact-finding and policymaking. Under a traditional administrative law model, primary responsibility for questions of fact would rest with the PTO. The role of the courts - whether the trial court or the appellate court - would be secondary. With respect to fact-finding, adopting certain aspects of the traditional administrative model is clearly necessary. Thus Congress should advance the PTO beyond its nineteenth century moorings and endow the agency with the expertise and neutrality necessary for it properly to wield significant fact-finding responsibility. At the same time, however, giving plenary responsibility on factual questions to the PTO would not be cost-effective. Accordingly, the trial courts should also be endowed with fact-finding expertise. Solving the allocation puzzle for questions of policy is more challenging. Each of the available institutional options - the legislature, the PTO, and the courts - has substantial associated liabilities. From the standpoint of political economy and institutional flexibility, the most disadvantaged institutional actor is probably Congress. The institutional choice thus comes down to one between the PTO and the appellate courts. On first examination, given the Federal Circuit's apparent aversion to policy analysis, its possible tendency towards pro-patent bias, and the well-known difficulties courts face in undertaking policymaking, the PTO might appear the better option. In order for the PTO to be a reasonably good policymaker, however, Congress would have to change the PTO into an altogether different agency: merely implementing reform that improved the agency's fact-finding capabilities would not be sufficient. In contrast, the level of change required in the court system would be less substantial. What we would need is greater generalist input in the appellate process. To some extent, the Supreme Court's increased interest in reviewing patent cases has already taken us down that path.

Building a cyberwar lab: lessons learned

With funding from NSF the Department has set up a stand alone lab for students to learn penetration testing techniques(attack), to harden their networks against these attacks (defense) , and also to gather enough evidence to through careful logging and audit controls to convict a hacker (convict). Linux RedHat 7.1 was used and all the machines were set up as standalone servers in three different subdomains, with 2 perimeter routers and 2 firewalls to allow experimentation with various configurations. In all over 50 software tools were downloaded and tested. Students were screened and asked to sign a disclaimer. They should also have been required to have networking experience. An initial mistake was to run a very minimal server with no services and practically no users. This was not realistic. It made it quick to rebuild systems but much harder to attack.The attacks need to be carefully planned and structured in a specific sequence one at a time, otherwise it becomes very difficult to follow what is going on.

Electromagnetic Induction Rediscovered Using Original Texts

Some of Faraday's diary-entries from 1831 have been used frequently as starting point to introduce the phenomenon of electromagnetic induction. This has been done on various levels of knowledge and to pupils of different ages during the last 5 years. I try to let my pupils witness, how Faraday made his discovery, but to show as well, that we cannot infer from his notes, how he arrived at his ideas proper. Reading the original notes (in English), my pupils were expected to take out of it, what Faraday did at his lab, what apparatus he used and what his observations were. Why he did what he did was point of discussion later on. Just here, I expected, that my pupils learn a lot about the properties of electricity, of taking conclusions from experiment, of scientific methodology etc. In addition, we repeated some of Faradays experiments with modern quipment, realizing always to common surprise that the effects observed are extremely faint ones. Depending on knowledge, age and motivation of the group, Lenz's Law was rediscovered in succession. Here I myself try to find out, why Faradays initial mistake as for the direction of the induced current is likely to be overlooked even by the informed modern reader (myself included!). This may become part of a story, why this mistake of Faraday has found serious attention by historians of science only very recently. My approach was connected with group work with English courses, with the reading of more papers by Faraday and two times even with a visit of the Royal Institution at London. In any case, I always tried to put my pupils into the state of knowledge Faraday had at the time of his discovery before this unit, to make the process of discovery as correct as possible. For this claim is somewhat artificial at first glance, it may be an interesting point of discussion.

Faraday's initial mistake concerning the direction of induced currents, and the manuscript of series I of his researches

L'A. etudie la theorie d'Ampere qui a conduit Faraday a corriger son erreur concernant la direction du courant induit, puis analyse les consequences de cette correction

WRITING AS A RESPONSIBILITY OF SCIENCE: A REPLY TO LABAND AND TAYLOR

It must have been around 1968, in the coffee room of the Social Science Building at Chicago, that Milton Friedman and the late George Stigler had a jovial and public conversation about being economists that made a big impression on me. Milton was lamenting the stupidity of tariffs, and George broke in, from a foot above, saying something as follows: Milton, you're such a preacher! If people want free trade they'll get it. If they don't want it, no amount of jawboning by economists will change their minds. Ah: that's where we differ, George. We admire markets, but you think they've already worked. And why not? People are self-interested, and they vote their pocketbooks -- that's enough to make the market work. They bought tariffs; tariffs must be what they want. No: they pursue their interests but often do not know what their interests are. People need education. The average citizen has no idea that a tariff hurts him. Education! Try educating a lobbyist for the textile industry. As I said, that's where we differ: I'm a teacher, and think that people do some things because they are ignorant. And I'm a scientist, an economic scientist; people do what they do because they are wise. Laband and Taylor are Stiglerites. They believe with Dr. Pangloss that we are in the best of all possible worlds. The Friedmanites, which is my own tribe, believe that we could be in it if we would only stop to think. The Stiglerites assume rationality; the Friedmanites teach it. The Stiglerites want to praise the world; the Friedmanites to change it. The Stiglerites detest policy; what is, is. The Friedmanites embrace it; what might be, can be. The Stiglerites are pessimistic, in the manner of the master. The Friedmanites are optimistic. Laband and Taylor, the reader can see, have a pessimistic and Stiglerite explanation of why they have not learned to write competently. They defend themselves against advice such as I give in the original paper by saying that it is presumptuous of anyone to claim unique knowledge of the marginal benefit to authors of investment in better presentation. If the investment we were talking about was oil drilling, I'd agree with their economics. I've written a book called If You're So Smart that makes a similar point about economic experts going around offering advice. But the investment in question -- here is where Laband and Taylor go wrong -- is economic education. Laband, Taylor, and I are economic educators. In the educational industry we are the oil drillers, the experts. We educate our student roughnecks in the craft, teaching them because we do know better (or else we should not be standing up there TuTh 10:50-12:10). Part of the craft, Laband and Taylor agree, is attending to elements of presentation. So the initial mistake in their paper is economic. They think that because some advice is silly and misinformed, all advice must be, even advice from teachers to students. Stiglerites tend to drive themselves into such extreme skepticism. But no one can actually live as an extreme skeptic. I'd like to see what Laband and Taylor say to a student who thinks that markets are bad for you -- do they agree mildly that it's just a matter of opinion? Another Stigler story. George opposed requirements in the graduate curriculum at Chicago. Around 1970 he killed off the requirement in the history of thought, which was his own field, and tried repeatedly to kill off economic history (he succeeded in 1980 when I left the faculty). His argument, which is heard in many other departments of economics, was that the graduate students should be free to choose (listen up, Milton). After all, they are just like consumers. What George, and Laband and Taylor, never answered was the Teacher's Point, which Milton made in the discussions about the history of thought requirement. We are teachers. We do know better. Graduate students, because they are not educated already (that's why they are students), often make bad decisions about their curricula. …

The Sublime, Self-Reference, and Wordsworth's Resolution and Independence

As a number of scholars have persuaded us, it is hard and a little dangerous to generalize about the sublime.* Hard, because the sublime is at once a diverse collection of aesthetic theories, a genre of literary performances, and a thematic paradigm that recurs, with a compulsive and often comic regularity, in post-Enlightenment writings of the highest and the lowest forms. Dangerous, because the attempt to generalize can involve the same combination of imaginative striving and failure-with the same effect of pathos verging on bathos-that characterizes some versions of the sublime itself. Conscious of both the difficulty and the danger, I will refrain from generalizing and simply stipulate: the sublime I have in mind is the one that depends on mistaking things, and thus on a lack of fit between the mind and its objects-for example, when one gives an object too much or the wrong kind of importance. One might call it the sublime of disproportion, or inaptitude, or discrepancy. What makes it sublime, instead of just grotesque or sentimental, is the way in which the particular discrepancy in question gets interpreted as a revelation of some higher or deeper power-ordinarily the power that was responsible for the initial mistake. This version of the sublime-and again

Proofreading by biological molecules detects “typos”

How does an enzyme know when it is making a mistake? The problem of accuracy in biosynthesis has been studied for a number of years. In DNA synthesis, for example, if too many errors occur a system cannot reproduce viable copies of itself. Too few and the system can never evolve. Solid‐state theorist John Hopfield at Princeton has proposed that many biological systems do “kinetic proofreading,” a method of replication in which the system looks twice so that it can correct an initial mistake. Recently several groups have shown experimentally that such proofreading does appear to be taking place.

Three-dimensional structure identified from single sections.

Errors in the identification of objects have been made frequently because of faulty interpretation of their flat images or sections. Such errors are perpetuated through a strange psychological chain reaction. 1) The first author who observes sections of an object, although presenting faithful pictures of sections of it, identifies its shape incorrectly. Such an initial mistake may be due to identification of the flat image with the object itself or to failure to consider the shape of the image as a function of the shape of the real object and the angle and level of cutting. 2) The first author describes verbally his personal concept of the object. 3) The reader reads the text of a publication before or without examining the pictorial evidence. 4) The reader's belief in the authority of the printed word immunizes him against critical evaluation of the evidence. 5) The reader regards a published opinion as a "fact." 6) A mechanism of suppression of new evidence is set up in the brain of the reader in favor of previously published, verbalized concepts. His brain unconsciously rejects new concepts that might arise intracerebrally. The printed word supersedes visual evidence. 7) A secondary mechanism parallels steps 3 to 6. An observer notices an unfamiliar figure in the microscope. Following established procedures for scientific investigations, he refrains from forming an opinion about his observation. Instead he rushes to the library searching for similar, published observations. If he finds a previous report about a similar shape, he accepts it as a "fact" and he "confirms" the previously printed viewpoint. Let me interject a personal experience concerning this mechanism. I investigated the arrangement of blood vessels in the human liver by means of corrosion preparations. The work was divided between an assistant and me. He was assigned the task of preparing drawings of two specimens. In his drawings he showed a structure which was absent from the specimens but had been described in a previous publication. This article shows simple ways for correct initial identification of shape and structure and for the breaking of the reverberating circuit of erroneous thinking.

Staphylinidae dermatitis on Okinawa.

A major outbreak of vesicular dermatitis occurred on Okinawa during the summer of 1966 (June-September). Approximately 2000 patients sought treatment at military medical facilities. It is estimated that there was an equal number of minor cases for which the afflicted persons did not seek medical attention. Originally it was thought the outbreak was the result of the blister beetle, family Meloidae. It was later proved that the dermatitis was the result of contact with the beetle, Paederus fuscipes Curtis (Kinki 1955), or a closely related species of the family Staphylinidae (rove beetle). The initial mistake in diagnosis was due to the little recognized effects of contact with the Paederus beetle as compared to the well known condition arising from contact with the blister beetle. This misleading idea can be explained by the peculiarity of the Staphylinidae poison usually taking 6 to 12 hr before the onset of its symptoms and another day before the formation of the typical blisters.

The Annals of Science:

A more volatile Sweden of 200 years ago incites Dr. Karin Dovring, an atavist from Urbana, to criticize current methodology of communication, especially the famed "semantic differential." This, says Dovring, represents the initial mistake of old Swedish orthodoxy in seeking heresy by first qualitative, then in primitive quantitative content analysis of sermons; only finally was a terms-in-context method evolved and it might well be employed today.

Troubles With Mass Communication and Semantic Differentials in 1744 and Today

A more volatile Sweden of 200 years ago incites Dr. Karin Dovring, an atavist from Urbana, to criticize current methodology of communica tion, especially the famed "semantic differential. " This, says Dovring, represents the initial mistake of old Swedish orthodoxy in seeking heresy by first qualitative, then in primitive quantitative content analysis of sermons; only finally was a terms-in-context method evolved and it might well be employed today.

British Food Journal Volume 11 Issue 11 1909

The Society of the White Cross of Geneva appears to have been founded with the object of organising on an international basis the attempts that are being made at the present time in civilised countries to bring under control, and if possible to stamp out, certain abuses, frauds, and other injurious factors more or less existent in modern civilised life. Among the subjects to be dealt with are mentioned “les empoisonnements alimentaires,” and adulteration generally, and the principal part of the business of the International Congress which met at Geneva last year and whose second sitting has just ended in Paris, appears to have related to food questions. The objects aimed at by the society are, no doubt, excellent, but they are hardly likely to be attained if the procedure followed in certain respects at the Geneva and Paris Congresses is adopted in the future. Many of the questions brought before these Congresses were of a highly technical nature, and, for this reason, it was not only very desirable, but absolutely necessary that the matters under discussion should have been dealt with, so far as time allowed, by a thoroughly representative international body composed exclusively of scientific and legal experts of recognised position in their respective countries—that is to say, if the conclusions arrived at were to be taken as representing a serious expression of authoritative opinion. It does not appear that the conclusions and resolutions of these Congresses were arrived at by meetings constituted on these lines, and it is probably for this reason that very little, if any, impression has been produced by the gatherings referred to. The initial mistake appears to have been the admission of a number of people who were obviously only interested in the commercial aspects of the subjects dealt with, and who were sufficiently numerous and persistent to influence the meetings in directions favourable to what were declared to be the “requirements” of trade.

I. The Date of Buddha's Death, as determined by a Record of Asoka.

There is a certain rock edict of Aśōka, regarding the interpretation and application of which no final result has as yet been arrived at. That this has been the case, is due chiefly to an unfortunate initial mistake, which introduced a supposed word, taken to mean “two and a half,” into the reading of a passage of primary importance which mentions a certain period of years. It was subsequently fully admitted that a misreading had been made. But the effect of that misreading remained. And, like similar mistakes in other matters, the initial mistake made here left an influence which neither the scholar who made it, nor subsequent inquirers, could shake off.