EDITOR'S TABLE. 



267 



his constituency so confidently of Mr. Spen- 

 cer's paucity of knowledge and his general 

 decrepitude does not seem to know that 

 intellect, feeling, and will are three depart 

 ments of mind, and that Mr. Spencer's state- 

 ment is applied to one only. "Intellectual 

 operations " are not all the operations of 

 mind. What Mr. Spencer says he may be 

 criticised for, not what his blind critic avers 

 that he says. Yet this perversion with its 

 comments occupies a long paragraph. 



I have not space for further illustration 

 of the heedless, dogmatic, crude, and false 

 statements with which this worthless critique 

 abounds ; but the public will be exposed to 

 its like so long as anonymity is the fashion 

 in book reviews. 



DANIEL GREENLEAF THOMPSON. 

 NEW YORK, October 30, 1893. 



COLORED AUDITION. 



Editor Popular Science Monthly : 



DEAR SIR : Struck with M. Binet's paper, 

 The Problem of Colored Audition, in The 



Popular Science Monthly for October, with- 

 out questioning the facts, when consulting 

 my own recollections I was unable to re- 

 call any one who possessed such curious 

 powers. 



Happening to meet to-day a young lady, 

 the talk was about pleasant or unpleasant 

 voices, such as are in use in ordinary conver- 

 sation. Both of us commented on the voice 

 of a person of our acquaintance, when the 

 lady said : " So-and-so has a green voice. It 

 always sounds green to me." 



Without bringing M. Binet to the front, 

 I questioned the lady in regard to this color 

 comparison. I found that voices, intonations, 

 and sounds had positive color effects on her 

 mind. There was a gentleman whose voice 

 was " red " to her. Then I asked her if she 

 had read M. Binet, and she said she had no 

 acquaintance with the article published by 

 you, nor had she any conception that there 

 was anything peculiar in her associating tones 

 with colors. She said she always did it. 



Respectfully, BARNET PHILLIPS. 



BROOKLYN, October 6, 1893. 



EDITOR'S TABLE. 



SCIENCE AND CIVILIZATION, 

 T MHE close of the great Columbian 

 -L Exposition at Chicago naturally 

 suggests reflections as to its general sig- 

 nificance and import. The Exposition 

 was meant to furnish a conspectus, as 

 it were, of what the art of man is able 

 to accomplish toward the end of the 

 nineteenth century ; and, as a memorial 

 of the civilization of to-day, its general 

 catalogue would be to future ages a 

 most important document. That the 

 Exposition as a whole was a vast and 

 overwhelming demonstration of the re- 

 sources of modern life, no one can 

 question. Until the riches of the world 

 are gathered together in some such way 

 we wholly fail to realize, and even 

 when they have been so gathered to- 

 gether, we but imperfectly very imper- 

 fectly indeed realize what the achieve- 

 ments of our age have been. When the 

 idea has, however, in some measure 

 been brought home to us, we involun- 

 tarily ask, What has made our age to 

 differ so much from past ages, when 



whole centuries would pass with very 

 little change in the outward conditions 

 of society ? The answer lies on the sur- 

 face : The modern world has found the 

 key to real knowledge. In former ages 

 a certain number of useful arts were 

 discovered empirically and more or less 

 fortuitously ; to-day we have learned 

 how to make discoveries, as it were, by 

 rule. We regard Nature as a book, 

 every leaf of which contains useful les- 

 sons, written sometimes in characters 

 difficult to decipher, but always deci- 

 pherable in the end if but proper pains 

 be taken and proper methods pursued. 

 In former ages men's minds were pos- 

 sessed by a number of absolute notions 

 and a priori principles which they ap- 

 plied to the interpretation, or rather 

 misinterpretation, of Nature; and as a 

 consequence the discovery of truth 

 lagged and languished. How greatly, 

 for example, was the progress of as- 

 tronomy retarded by the assumption 

 that as the circle was a perfect figure, 

 the planets must move in circles; that 



