Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/735

Rh service; in the abuse of the power and discretion of the court in granting excuses on the ground of "business engagements," or other trivial pretexts; in the collusion of officers to keep names off the jury-lists; and in public apathy and unwillingness to serve. Hence jury-duty has to be performed largely by persons who arc not worthy of it, and who arc often regardless of the obligation of an oath. "To revive its usefulness." Mr. Young says, "the jury must be purged. As an institution handed down by our forefathers, it is amply sufficient for the purposes for which it was intended. It is only in its abuse that we suffer, and that abuse can only be remedied by a revival of public spirit, and the realization of the fact that private interests are best subserved by the devotion of a part of our time to public duties."

Colored Audition.—M. A. de Rochas has published some notes on "Colored Audition," a faculty which some persons are alleged to possess of perceiving sensations of color in connection with the hearing of particular sounds. To most of the persons who have reported to him on the subject, acute sounds and the vowel i (French) appear red or of a brilliant color, but the variations in the matter are infinite. One lady associates its especial color with each note of the musical scale, each vowel, and each digit; and she never hears any sum mentioned without the colors of all the figures it contains passing in succession before her eyes. Another lady Bees names colored—John, bright red; Joseph, very dark blue; Louis, red; Louisa, blue; and Lucy, yellow; while all names ending in us are green. An engineer associates a color with the name of every day of the week. To him, Monday is a gray day; Tuesday and Wednesday, white; Thursday, yellow; Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, dark red. Most of the persons known to have this faculty have had it from infancy.

The National Museum.—By a "Handbook" just published by Ernest Ingersoll and his associates, Messrs. Taylor and Ainsworth, the National Museum at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, is shown to be a group of most interesting and varied collections. It started with the remarkable and heterogeneous accumulation of curiosities at the Patent-Office which once formed one of the great attractions for visitors to the national capital. The Smithsonian Institution having been organized and housed, and the Patent-Office having become too full of the models and goods legitimately its own, the curiosities were turned over to the care of the Smithsonian agents. To these collections have been added from time to time—after the Centennial Exhibition, the government exhibits of other countries; the zoological treasures of the Fish Commission; specimens of natural resources from Territorial surveys; the mineralogical, geological, archæological, anthropological, and natural history treasures that have been gathered in the course of the Government surveys which have been systematically carried on over our whole domain; and various articles, special collections, etc., gathered from different quarters of the globe. The museum is housed in dust-proof plate-glass cases, in a building which has been constructed expressly for it, and which is described as having been filled up from the Greek cross radiating from a central rotunda into a complete square, the exterior walls of which arc three hundred and seventy-five feet in length. The various collections have been scientifically and topically classified and arranged, and are accessible in the several departments of geology, mineralogy, chemistry, economic geology, and metallurgy, as representing the inorganic world; and of botany, zoölogy, anthropology, archæology, ethnology, and comparative technology, as representing the organic world; each of the departments being further subdivided according to its various branches. The museum is under the care of Dr. Spencer F. Baird as director, and G. Brown Goode as assistant director, with twenty-four curators, all but nine of whom serve without expense to it.

Poetry and Reality In Zuñi.—Dr. R. W. Shufeldt, U. S. Army, in a sketch, in "Forest and Stream," of an excursion through Zuñi-land, speaks of his entrance into the pueblo as like stepping from the pictures—which we have in the descriptions of Mr. Cushing and others—into the reality. "There were the squarish houses all piled up on one