The painter’s original color chart might well have been the rainbow, and while we can not make colors more beautiful than those we see in the sky, we can imitate them with pigments. A pigment, taking its name from the Latin pingere, to paint, is a coloring material. Many pigments are found in Nature. Yellow ochre, for example, is a clay dug from the earth. Cobalt blue comes from a mine in the form of ore. Plants and trees supply us with a variety of natural pigments. On the other hand, coal tar is an example of artificial coloring material from which the great group of aniline dyes is developed.

Yellow ochre is one of the simplest pigments to obtain, yet neither the house painter nor the artist could use it in its raw state. Were we to spread yellow ochre on the side of a house, the first good rain would wash it off. But if we mix it with linseed oil, we get oil paint, which will hold. If we combine it with glycerin and gum arabic, we have a water-color paint; if we mix it with chalk or wax, we obtain pastels and crayons. In all cases the pigment is the same, while the mixing materials differ in accordance with the use intended for them. Today, colors come ready-made, but once the painter had to be his own chemist.

An aptitude test is a test of a person’s natural, untrained fitness to do some special thing, like learn foreign languages, play the violin or operate a complicated machine. Aptitude tests should not be confused with intelligence tests or with tests of skill given to people who have had training along the lines of the test. Aptitude tests aim to discover fitness along certain lines rather than to measure progress or intelligence.

Suppose you plan to study the violin but have no idea as to your fitness to do so. There is one aptitude test you can take which may warn you that you face a handicap. This is a test of musical pitch. It will discover your ability, or lack of ability, to tell when a given musical tone is higher or lower than some other given tone. If you do very badly with the test, it would hardly be wise for you to study the, violin since your ear might never permit you to play in tune, no matter how much you practiced. Or suppose you wanted to prepare yourself for an occupation requiring a reliable sense of color. An aptitude test might show that you were color-blind, unable to distinguish red from brown and yellow from orange. The test would save you from a costly mistake. If it showed you to have a fine color sense, you would then have a solid basis of encouragement.

Most aptitude tests are not so simple as the two mentioned because a person’s fitness to do some one thing often depends on more than one ability. This holds true even in the case of playing the violin. Violin playing does not depend on pitch sense alone. There is the question of the player’s sense of melody, for which a test exists. Also there is his sense of harmony to be considered for which various different tests have been developed. Rhythmic sense is also very important to musical performance and it can be tested, Tests are frequently given in groups, called batteries, and in that way tell about a person’s aptitudes somewhat more clearly than single tests could do.

There is a way to test the tests themselves. That is to compare the results of aptitude tests with the later success or failure of the people who took them. These comparisons, known as correlations, are not always favorable to the accuracy of the tests. People have done well at things for which the tests showed them unfitted and the other way around. The problem of discovering talents and predicting success is still far from solved.

In answering this question we must bear in mind that each language contains a certain number of words that form the backbone of the language and that may be used for ordinary purposes, and also a number of technical words that are coined as new developments in science take place. Of the non-technical words in English, the longest is probably antidisestablishmentarianism, which has 28 letters. Even longer words may be formed by adding prefixes such as anti- or non-, or suffixes such as -istical or -ly. Thus the perfectly normal word denomination may become interdenominationalistically and to this curious word we may add the prefix anti-. But the word antiinterdenominationalistically is to be considered as a freak rather than as a typical dictionary word.

As for technical words, there seems to be almost no limit to their length. For example, if you have toothache, your pain may be relieved by the chemical known as dimethylaminophenyldimethylpyrazolondiethylmalonylurea. Sufferers from liver trouble have often been helped by phenoltetrabromphthaleintetrachlorphalein, another chemical.

Other languages have their unusually long words. Welsh is justly famous for its long place names. We can imagine the plight of a railroad conductor who must call out the railway station of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgo. gerychwyrndrobwll-Llantysiliogogogoch!

In German the practice of combining a number of short words to form a long word has brought about some startling combinations. The six-letter English word hyphen becomes in German Zusammenziehungszeichen (literally: together-combining-mark). The American author Mark Twain came upon such interesting specimens as Generalstaatsverordnetenversammlungen (meetings of the legislature; literally: general-states- representatives-gatherings) and Waffenstillstandsunterhandlungen (negotiations for a truce; literally: weapons-motionless-position-negotiations). There is almost no end to the making of compounds in German; many of them are not to be found in any dictionary.

Many Indian words are also extremely long. This is because most of the American Indian languages often compress a whole phrase or even a whole sentence in a single word. Thus, in the Indian language known as Algonkian, yalevolemaktawpokwose means “I am walking about carrying a beautiful black umbrella over my head.” Even longer than this is the Algonkian word wutappesittukqussunnoohwehtunkquoh, which means “kneeling down to him.” This word occurs in the translation of the Bible into Algonkian by John Eliot, a famous colonial missionary to the Indians.

When the good Indian chief Lepodotemachoselachogaleokranioleipsanodrimupo (cont) trimmatosilphioparaomelitokatakeclummenokichle (cont)pikossuphophattoperisteralektruonoptegkephalokig (cont) klopeleiolagoosiraiobaletraganopterugon died in i866, in Wisconsin, he bequeathed to posterity what is perhaps the longest word of which there is record: his name! It has no less than I 79 letters.

Cecil Rhodes was an Englishman who went out to South Africa when only a boy and soon began to dig for diamonds. He was successful, and when twenty years old returned to England and entered Oxford University. His health, was delicate, and it was eight years before he took his degree. During these years be spent much time in South Africa seeking health and looking after his business affairs.

After leaving Oxford he returned to South Africa and became very wealthy from mines of gold and diamonds. When he died, in 1902, it was found that he had left most of his wealth to trustees to found scholarships at Oxford University.

Rhodes believed that the world would be helped if all English-speaking people knew more about one another. Therefore the scholars were to be appointed from nearly all parts of the British Empire and from the United States. Germany, too, was allotted five scholars a year, but this was canceled by the British Parliament in 1916.

Each province of Canada appoints a scholar every year and thirty-two come each year from the United States—-f our each from eight groups of six states. There are about 200 Rhodes scholars in all. They are young men; they receive about 2,000 each year, and the scholarships are for two or three years. At first they were required to study at Oxford, but now they may choose another university for all or part of the time.