Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 21.djvu/735

Rh responsibility would be overwhelming for an individual, and a cabinet, if dispersed, takes hours to bring together."The danger of panic, to which the people and the markets would be constantly exposed, in the view of such apprehensions as these, is one the effects of which would be real. Such objections to the tunnel have found formal expression in a remonstrance which has been signed by men whose names carry weight everywhere, and have at last brought about a suspension of the project. A very curious objection, which Americans can hardly appreciate, is suggested in "The Spectator." It is that the tunnel would turn England into an outlying peninsula of the European Continent, and "would be almost purely mischievous, as slowly destroying the insularity and separateness of the national character."

CoIor-Names and Color-Sense.—Dr. B. Joy Jeffries, in an article in "Education," calls attention to the fact that the power to give right color-names does not indicate the possession of a right perception of colors. "A blind child will give the name of the color of grass, trees, apples, bananas, bricks, its companion's clothes, and perhaps even of hundreds of objects, the color-name of which it has learned. So, also, the color-blind boy will do the same. It is one thing to learn the color-name connected with a remembered object, and a very different thing to connect the right name with the sensation a green color arouses. Here has been the mistake which object-teaching has rather fostered than corrected." It is evident, he adds, that teaching color in the schools must embrace the detection of color-blindness in the boys, the learning the names of the commonest colors at least, the sharpening of the appreciation and discrimination of colors, and thus the gradual education of the color-sense. Instruction should begin in primary or Kindergarten work, and be steadily pursued through school-life. Congenital color-blindness is incurable, but it may be somewhat palliated. It is not exhibited as strongly in artificial as in natural light. Looking through a piece of lemon-colored glass will help the color-blind in daylight or electric light; and the same is true of looking through a solution of gelatine stained with fuchsine. No temporary or permanent change takes place in the color-sense under these circumstances, but alterations of light and shade are made which the color-blind have learned, unconsciously, to avail themselves of.



our notice, in the July number, of the death of Professor W. B. Rogers, we ascribed it, following the newspaper reports, to apoplexy. We now learn from his brother, Professor R. E. Rogers, that the deceased died from heart-disease. Professor Rogers's physicians pronounced the cause of his death to be "an attack of the heart, in which life was extinct before his body reached the floor."

, co-editor with Dr. Charles Richet of the "Revue Scientifique," in Paris, died of a disease of the heart on the 8th of July, in the thirty-second year of his age. He was distinguished in science chiefly as an electrician, and took a conspicuous part in the management of the International Exposition of Electricity of last year. Among his earlier writings was a paper on the theory of the Gramme machine, which was published in the "Annales de Chimie et de Physique." He contributed many articles to "La Nature" between 1875 and 1878; and became co-editor of the "Revue Scientifique" on the retirement of M. Alglave from that journal in 1880.

in a study of the Indian languages of the Pacific States and Territories, and of the Pueblos of New Mexico, disputes the affinities which are supposed by many to exist between the Aztecs and the Pueblos. The oldest and most important characteristics of race and language, he alleges, are far from being common to both races, and even secondary and more recent characteristics, as implements, manners, customs, laws, government, religions, beliefs, worship, and traditions, have not been shown to be identical in them. A comparison of all of the four languages of the Pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona results in showing that none of them have sufficient affinity with Aztec to justify a classification with it.

French Department of Public Works reports that of the 39,938,126 metres representing the total length of the national highways of the country, 23,731,928 metres may be bordered with trees. Of this distance, 14,335,311 metres have already been planted with 2,691,698 trees, leaving 9,396,617 metres yet to be planted. 