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 occupation 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 lampshades and indescribable things in cardboard and colored wools—by anything, in fact, that is either pretty on the one hand or mannish on the other, or is remote from every-day affairs. This criticism 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 concern 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 physiologists have occupied themselves with it and made laboratory experiments on it.
Notwithstanding all investigation, the subject is still imperfectly 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 comprehensive 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.
