Room No. 10 contains a very extensive and most interesting collection of ancient pottery.  There are many of the painted vases with which the world has become so well acquainted, and which, as being the more showy objects, will on his first entrance attract the eye of the visitor.  But if he will with loving patience examine the vast numbers of utensils of every sort which have been with the utmost care sifted, one might almost say, from out of the mass of debris which the recent excavations have thrown up, he will find an amount of suggestive illustration of the old pagan life of two thousand years ago which cannot fail to interest and instruct him.

T.A.T.

OUR FOREIGN SURNAMES.

It is interesting as well as amusing to read the foreign names upon the signs in the streets of our cities and towns, and observe the number of nationalities thereon represented, together with the peculiarities of form and meaning displayed by the names themselves.

German names meet the eye everywhere, and are usually very outlandish in appearance, while many of them have significations which are conspicuously and ludicrously inappropriate.  For example, a lager-beer saloon in one of our large cities is kept by Mr. Heiliggeist ("Holy Ghost"); a cigar-shop in another place belongs to Mr. Priesterjahn ("Prester John"); while the pastor of a devout German flock in a third locality is the Rev. Mr. Wuestling ("low scoundrel").  The Hon. Carl Schurz, too, is hardly the sort of man to be named “apron,” though it is certainly true that his name is in this country sometimes pronounced “Shirts.”

Other branches of the great Teutonic family have many representatives among us, and their names seem, to the uninitiated, even more fearfully and wonderfully constructed than those of their German cousins.  It produces a good deal of surprise in the mind of an American to see on the sign of a tradesman from Belgium the familiar name of Cox spelled “Kockx;” and the Norwegian patronymic Trondhjemer ("Drontheimer"), though a very mild specimen of the language, has a formidable aspect to the general beholder.

The German-Hebrew names display such an exuberant Eastern fancy in their composition as to suggest the inquiry whether they are not really but German translations of their possessors’ original Oriental titles.  It is not unlikely that this was the origin of names like Rosenthal ("Vale of Roses"), Lilienhain ("Meadow of Lilies"), Liebenstrom ("Stream of Love"), and Goldenberg ("Golden Mount").