Faculty of observing;

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VOL. X N E W Y O R K , A P R I L , 1927 No. 4
The Faculty of Observing
T H E story of how a band of desert
thieves was traced through having
stolen a half-blind camel with a front tooth
missing, represents the acme of refinement in
observation. The story is old. It may have
no basis of fact. Perhaps it was devised by
some ingenious educator merely for the pur­pose
of leaving an imprint on the minds of
youthful readers. But it has its point.
The substance of the story is that a
robber-band, preying on a settlement of
peaceful Arabs, seized and made off with
all the available camels. Among the
camel booty was one which was blind in one
eye and minus a front tooth. When the
desert police took up the trail, they had
little more than this description, and the
general direction taken by the robbers, to
guide them.
Coming to an oasis, they noticed, where
camels had been cropping at the grass,
that one line of cropping veered constantly
to the left. Also that there were blades
of grass which remained uncropped along
the center of the line. From these ob­servations
they deduced that the veering
line, with the untouched blades, was the
result of the grazing of the partially tooth­less
camel which was blind in its left eye,
and so traced the herd until the robbers
were apprehended.
The accountant admittedly is absolved
from the necessity of having to possess all
the knowledge of a lawyer, or of an en­gineer.
He has no particular duty to act
as a detective. In most of his engage­ments,
however, it will do him no harm to
cultivate more intensively the faculty of
observing and to consider more carefully
the significance of what he may observe.
Auditing, if one is not careful, may be­come
a matter of merely checking figures. It
is an easy matter to pass over signs, which if
observed, would point the way to startling
disclosures. Slight inconsistencies often
serve as clues to gross irregularities care­fully
concealed. Only recently, concealment
of a substantial shortage was attempted by
the use of some fifty forged notes.
The forgeries were clever and the notes,
hastily examined, had every appearance
of being genuine. But there were slight
inconsistencies, noticeable upon careful
observation. A certain name was written
"Carey" on the face of the note; "Cary" on
the reverse side. A certain French name
was written as pronounced, not as spelled.
Numbers on the notes were out of line
with numbers in current use. The date
February 29 was used in a year having but
three hundred and sixty-five days.
Unless documents are carefully and