Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/883

Rh Columbus, etc., constitute another class; and the collection will be completed with representations of fine-art works, literary and scientific publications, and manuscripts, charts, and plans from the discovery to the middle of the eighteenth century. Prizes and diplomas are offered for the contributions.

The Royal Tombs of Uganda.—Dr. Carl Peters gives the following description of the more modern royal tombs of Uganda: "On approaching them from a distance the traveler thinks he sees pyramids before him, but in reality they are in the form of large cones, and are built of wood in Uganda fashion. On entering, the visitor finds himself in a dusky hall, supported by a row of columns. In the background of this hall is a painted curtain, before which are ranged the weapons and favorite movables of the deceased. On putting aside the curtain the dark area is entered, from which shafts and corridors have been excavated in the ground. In these passages textile stuffs, cowrie shells, and other articles of value, which in Uganda represent money, are heaped up. At the farthest extremity of these passages is deposited the coffin, with the embalmed corpse of the dead person. It appears that the regular procedure for preserving the corpse is by drying it, and swathing it tight in wrappings; but the Waganda also told me that they understood the art of preserving the body from decomposition by injections into the blood. In front of the curtain twelve girls watch day and night on behalf of the last one departed; at present, therefore, for Mtesa. From time lo time all the great men of the land come to the dead man, with drums and fifes, to pay him a visit, as if he were alive."

Excess in Ornamentation.—In his book on the Planning of Ornament, Mr. Lewis F. Day recognizes as among the æsthetic faults of modern architecture its too free use of ornament without reference to its fitness to the other details of the structure, and relative neglect of proportion. A writer who timidly suggested lately that by a proper attention to proportion ornament might be economized, found himself out of fashion, as he doubtless apprehended. The Saturday Review enforces the precepts of the two authors, with a comparison of two buildings that stand near one another in London. Of one, the "front is composed of arches and columns—the arches of colored marbles, the columns of polished granite, the capitals of bronze, heavily gilt. Not far from it is another elevation, partly in brick and plaster, painted drab and wholly devoid of any ornament; yet the eye lingers lovingly on it. The proportions are like those of, say, one of Gray's odes, or one of Mendelssohn's songs without words. The whole façade cost perhaps seven or eight hundred pounds; but, then, it was designed by Wren. The bank front cost, at a moderate estimate, seventy or eighty thousand pounds, yet, because the architect, or, to speak more exactly, the builder, did not mix his design with a single ounce of brains, had not, in fact, so much brains to bestow upon it, all the money spent has produced so hideous a pile that one instinctively turns from it as one turns from a sudden glare or a street accident." Like contrasts may be found in almost any large town.

Amusements of Animals.—A writer in the London Spectator suggests as a logical order in which to consider some of the powers of enjoyment possessed by animals, without exaggerating or depreciating them, is to observe their development as the animal itself grows up. The faculty of amusement comes early in them. Many animals are aware of this, and make it part of their maternal duties to amuse their young. A ferret will play with her kittens, a cat with hers, and a dog with her puppies. A mare will play with her foal, though the writer from whom we quote has never seen a cow try to amuse her calf, nor any birds their young. If their mothers do not amuse them, the young ones invent games of their own. A flock of ewes and lambs were observed in the Isle of Wight in adjoining fields, separated by a fence with several gaps in it. "Follow my leader" was the game most in favor with this flock, the biggest lamb leading round the field and then jumping the gap, with all the others following in single file; any lambs that took the leap unusually well would give two or three more enthusiastic jumps out of sheer exuberant