spacious corridors on as
many stories. The central building is flanked by two tall square
campaniles, and from its sides extend long wings which curve toward
the river: these have colonnades and terraces in front overlooking
the garden, its picturesque and grotesque cottages and pavilions, its
fountains and its parterres of gay flowers.

The Trocadero has been purchased by the town council of Paris, and is
to be a permanent structure, its flanking salons, forty-two feet wide,
being known as "Galeries de l'Art Retrospective." Its collection is
to form a history of civilization, and will probably include the
Egyptian, Assyrian and similar collections from the Louvre, as well as
the Ethnological, which is at St. Germain. It is designed to represent
in chronological order ancient and historic art, both liberal and
mechanical, with the furniture, arms and tools of the Middle Ages and
Renaissance, arms, implements and fabrics from the East, Africa and
Oceanica, and a collection of musical instruments of all ages and
countries. This is an ambitious programme, but will no doubt be well
accomplished. Its general color is that of the beautiful stone of this
region, a delicate cream. The uniformity is broken by great boldness
and variety in the structural form of the building, and by its
pillars, deep colonnades and heavy cornices, giving shadows which
prevent monotony of tint.

While artists and architects disagree like the proverbial doctors, and
purists shudder at the jumble of orders, periods and nationalities, a
tyro may well hesitate. An opinion of the building will no more suit
everybody than does the building itself; but one cannot entirely
forfeit one's reputation for taste, for each will find some agreeing
judgments. All must acknowledge that it has a gala air. Its central
dome, tall minarets and wings widespread toward the river crown the
height and seem to foster the beauties they partly enclose.

The circular corridor of the rotunda is surmounted by the Muses and
other figures typical of the future purposes of the building. The
rotunda-walls are themselves castellated, the towers being interplaced
with windows of Saracenic arched form. The beton pavement of the
corridors and balcony is made of annular fragments, facets upward,
of black, red, white and slate-colored marbles, feldspar and other
stones. It is as hard as natural rock and as smooth as half-polished
marble. A tessellated fret pattern is made along the bo