812 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



special building and in many of the Western State buildings. An 

 even larger portion of the women of this country are occupied in 

 home management, and it might have been expected that, under 

 the direction of the Board of Lady Managers and in the Woman's 

 Building, some systematic representation of this important occu- 

 pation would be found. But no; the women of America have 

 preferred to be represented by their painting, their books, their 

 embroidery, their societies for inducing other people to become 

 wiser and better, their work as hospital nurses, by paper lamp- 

 shades and indescribable things in cardboard and colored wools 

 by anything, in fact, that is either pretty on the one hand or man- 

 nish on the other, or is remote from every-day affairs. This criti- 

 cism must not be taken as evidence of a wish to restrict women 

 to housework alone. The real feeling of the writer can not be 

 better expressed than by the following words from the preliminary 

 address of the Woman's Committee on Household Economics: 

 " It is not necessary to consider whether woman's sphere is limited 

 to her home it concerns us to so improve the work done in the 

 home that out of it shall come a power so well trained, by careful 

 study of scientific and economic principles, that it will facilitate 

 and lighten, as well as dignify, household labor." 



THE PROBLEM OF COLORED AUDITION. 



BY M. ALFRED BINET. 



MUCH attention has been given lately to the subject of colored 

 audition. It has been discussed in daily journals and in 

 literary and scientific reviews ; in medical theses, memoirs, and 

 didactic treatises ; it has figured in poetry and romance, and on 

 the stage ; it has been the occasion of many inquiries ; and physi- 

 ologists have occupied themselves with it and made laboratory ex- 

 periments on it. 



Notwithstanding all investigation, the subject is still imper- 

 fectly known and understood. It has been studied mostly from 

 without. The details concerning the sounds and the associated 

 colors have been carefully noted, but no one has told what colored 

 audition is, or has made it intelligible to those who know of it only 

 from others. We can not hope to be much more fortunate than 

 our predecessors ; but we shall direct our attention to the points 

 they have overlooked, and shall try to describe a mental state in 

 colored audition. Let us point out first, in order to gain a com- 

 prehensive view upon these questions, the circumstances under 

 which a person first perceives that he has the faculty, as it has 

 been called, of coloring sounds. 



