Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/831

Rh wet by dipping into a moat containing water, and the constant evaporation from the cloth produces the cooling action of the apparatus. One of the schoolrooms in the Children's Building is a "Kitchen Garden," in which housework lessons with toys are given to very young girls. Its aim, as stated on its placards, is "to take the drudgery out of so-called menial work and elevate the home duties of women by inspiring the pupils with the right way of doing things at an age when life-long impressions and habits are formed." The lessons include waiting on the door, passing a tray, bedmaking, and a broom drill. There is an advanced course for older girls which includes cooking and laundry work. The originator of the Kitchen Garden is Miss Emily Huntington, of New York, who may be consulted daily upon the organization of industrial classes for girls.

Domestic economy has not been omitted from the list of congresses held in connection with the fair. Its congress will be held in the second week of October, under the direction of the Woman's Committee on Household Economics, in the Woman's Branch of the World's Congress Auxiliary. This committee has also been charged with the duty of presenting its subject in the agricultural, labor, sanitary, and other congresses. Unfortunately, more than half the usefulness of all the congresses has been thrown away by holding them seven miles from the center of attraction and in noisy surroundings.

After everything relating to household management has been sought out, the visitor can not resist the conviction that the exhibits at the Columbian Exposition fall very far short of what they might have been and should have been in justice to the importance of the subject. Two of the excellent exhibits of cooking processes are placed in an out-of-the-way spot. Few products of home cookery are shown, and nothing except preserves. Domestic laundry operations are not illustrated at all; laundered articles are sent from schools in England and Germany, but nothing from any American school, and no American woman has shown her skill in washing flannels without their shrinking, colored goods and embroideries without the colors running, or in putting-a gloss upon starched linens. In needlework the ornamental has buried the practical out of sight. The difference between the right and the wrong way of making a bed, of sweeping and dusting a room, of cleaning windows and woodwork, and of setting and decorating a table, might all have been illustrated to the great profit of many thousands of visitors. The difficulties in the way of such exhibits are no greater than those that have been overcome in other cases. According to the census, more than half the men of the United States engaged in gainful occupations are occupied with agriculture; and this industry is adequately represented in its