ABSTRACT
Psychology, lacking a notation with which to cumulate its knowledge, reinvents its subject matter from generation to generation. A topic is worked on at some time, interest in it peaks and then wanes, the topic is set aside, and then some time later is rediscovered. Movements of the eyes is such a topic; their saccadic nature in reading was reported first only in 1878. They were studied intensively for a generation, then ignored for another, studied again, again ignored, and now are studied once again. One of those cycles caught up Raymond Dodge in the early years of this century; another, about a generation later, caught up Guy Thomas Buswell. Dodge's work has never been wholly out of the canon of the experimental psychologist, but Buswell, working in a different tradition, has not been as well known. His first important work on eye movements was published in 1920 when he was in his thirties, and he continued to publish on the subject for more than 25 years. Except for a book in 1935, How People Look at Pictures, his major works were published in Supplementary Educational Monographs, a series published by the University of Chicago, where he did his work, and were well known to educational psychologists, but not to many others.
