472 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



how hard it is to get a new idea into people's heads. In brief, 

 this officer is as zealons in attracting audiences, in arousing com- 

 munities, in promoting the aims of his society, as if he were a 

 man of business creating a market for profitable wares, or a mis- 

 sionary spreading gospel light. Let us note a case or two where 

 the lack of such an officer in the receiving or visiting body has 

 been felt. At Rochester, last August, the American Association 

 was tendered a reception in an art gallery on the upper floors of 

 an office building. Its owner was in Europe, which doubtless 

 accounted for the catalogues of the collection being not lent but 

 sold to his guests, while a staring sign announcing, " To the steel 

 tower — ten cents," was permitted to remain uncovered. At Roch- 

 ester, too, a city famous for its nurseries, it never occurred to the 

 local committee that visitors would be glad to see these nurseries. 

 Their gates, of course, stood open, yet a very little trouble taken 

 to provide informed guides at a stated time would have added 

 much to the profit and pleasure of a visit. During the week of 

 last Christmas the American Psychological Association met at 

 the University of Pennsylvania. Its first session was held in an 

 upper room of the main building, the second took place in an- 

 other building some distance off. Because there was no public 

 notification of this change of place, a score of members, teachers, 

 and reporters wasted an afternoon, and missed the presidential 

 address which three of them had come a hundred miles to hear. 

 A few years ago the American Institute of Mining Engineers met 

 at Lookout Mountain. One of the party was the late Thomas 

 Sterry Hunt, an ex-president. In an address which could only 

 come from a master in both chemistry and geology, he described 

 the history of the region at his feet. As he spoke, the conclu- 

 sions of many thoughtful years were compressed into his pithy 

 sentences. Because he had prepared no notes, and because no 

 stenographer was engaged, that masterly discourse is now only a 

 fading memory. 



M. Lionel Deole, who has lately returned from the Zambesi region in Central 

 Africa, recently visited the underground lake of Sinoie. He describes it as pre- 

 senting one of the most wonderful specimens which can be given to man to con- 

 template on the globe. The water is remarkably blue, far more so than that of 

 the blue grottoes of Capri. 



Giving his personal and political reminiscences in a recent address, Sir John 

 Lubbock said that he took the first photograph (rather daguerreotype) ever taken 

 in England. Daguerre was a great friend of his father's, and, when he had com- 

 pleted the invention, sent hira over a lens with complete apparatus. Sir John, 

 who was then a very small child, was told to remove the cap, and, doing so, 

 achieved the feat. 



