I 



POPULAR MISCELLANY. 



717 



service ; in the abuse of the power and dis- 

 cretion of the court in granting excuses on 

 the ground of " business engagements," or 

 otlier 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 are not worthy of it, 

 and who arc often regardless of the obli- 

 gation of an oath. " To revive its useful- 

 ness," Mr. Young says, "the jury must be 

 purged. As an institution handed down by 

 our forefathers, it is amply sufHcient 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 oui' time to public 

 duties." 



Colored Andition. — 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. Anothter lady 

 sees names colored — John, bright red ; Jo- 

 seph, very dark blue ; Louis, red ; Louisa, 

 blue ; and Lucy, yellow ; while all names 

 ending in %k are green. An engineer as- 

 sociates 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 9Insenm. — By a "Hand- 

 book " just published by Ernest Ingersoll 

 and his associates, Messrs. Taylor and Ains- 

 worth, the National Museum at the Smith- 

 sonian Institution, Washington, is shown to 

 be a group of most interesting and varied 

 collections. It started with the remarkable 



and heterogeneous accumulation of curiosi- 

 ties at the Patent-Oflicc which once foi-raed 

 one of the great attractions for visitors to 

 the national capital. The Smithsonian In- 

 stitution having been organized and housed, 

 and the Patent-OflSce 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 Commis- 

 sion ; specimens of natural resources from 

 Territorial surveys ; the mineralogical, geo- 

 logical, archaeological, anthropological, and 

 natural history treasures that have been 

 gathered in the course of the Government 

 surveys which have been systematically car- 

 ried 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 con- 

 structed expressly for it, and which is de- 

 scribed as having been filled up from the 

 Greek cross radiating from a central rotunda 

 into a complete square, the exterior walls 

 of which are three hundred and seventy-five 

 feet in length. The various collections have 

 been scientifically and topically classified 

 and arranged, and are accessible in the sev- 

 eral departments of geology, mineralogy, 

 chemistry, economic geology, and metallur- 

 gy, as representing the inorganic world ; and 

 of botany, zoology, anthropology, archaeolo- 

 gy, ethnology, and comparative technology, 

 as representing the organic world ; each of 

 the departments being further subdivided 

 according to its various branches. The mu- 

 seum 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 Znai.— Dr. R. W. 

 Shufeldt, U. S. Army, in a sketch, in " For- 

 est and Stream," of an excursion through 

 Zuiii-land, speaks of his entrance into the 

 pueblo as like stepping from the pictures — 

 which we have in the descriptions of Mr. 

 Gushing and others — into the reality. " There 

 were the squarish houses all piled up on one 



