to one third as much as similar
articles of solid silver. Anything of a much lower standard than this is
trash and vulgarity.

For our part, we prefer good plated ware to solid plate. In plated ware
we can now have all the beauty of form, all the brilliancy of surface,
all the durability and utility of solid silver, without its excessive
costliness, without appearing to be guilty of ostentation, without
putting our neighbors to shame, and without offering a perpetual
temptation to burglars.

WHAT WE FEEL.

It would seem to be folly for any one to maintain that grass is not
green, that sugar is not sweet, that the rose has no odor and the
trumpet no tone. A man would seem to be out of his senses deliberately
to doubt what the world thinks to be simple truths. Yet this paper will
deliberately question these truths. It will endeavor to demonstrate that
the greenness, the sweetness, the fragrance, the music, are not inherent
qualities of the objects themselves, but are cerebral sensations, whose
existence is limited to the senses of organized beings.

Is grass green? First let us inquire what green is,--what color is.
Light is now understood to be an undulation of the interstellar ether,
that inconceivably rare, elastic expanse of matter which occupies all
space,--an undulation communicated by the incandescent envelope of suns.
It moves with such wondrous rapidity as to traverse hundreds of
thousands of miles in a second. Such is the generally received
explanation of the phenomenon of light; but there is much yet to be
explained for which this simple undulation of matter seems to be an
insufficient cause. These waves of motion have different lengths and
rates of velocity; but the union of them all gives to the human eye the
impression of white light. When a prism intercepts their flow, it, so to
speak, assorts these differing waves; and, being separated, they then
impress the eye with the color of the spectrum, the retina being
differently affected by the differing velocities with which it is
touched by the ethereal waves. Color, then, is the sensation of the
brain, responsive to the touch of the motion of ether; and the brain is
only thus affected when these waves are thrown back from some object to
the eye. The multiplicity of tints and hues are reflections from the
objects which appear to possess them as structural characters. Some of
the waves pass into the objects and through them, others are arrested by