Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1912-01-21
Around the Civ,

Diana Of the Tides" the largest
painting in the National Gallery. is now
permanently at home in the new nu-
scum. To visit this huntress turned
moon goddess you must leave your UNI
brella at the door and travel, unarmed
among savage tribes, through stalactite
caverns. across jungles stuffed with
beast-creatures all horns. claws and big
teeth, until you come to a vast. silent
hall, where everything is snow white
except the floor of-lets call it souse-
cheese stone.
A woman who likes to prowl through
the museum every chance she gets
reached Diana's hall yesterday just as a
young woman was turning away to say
! to the older woman with her:
Nothing in there but picture. Come
on, Aunt Beulah"
Aunt Beulah peeked in wistfully, but
she followed her leader and that was all
there was to it except that the young
woman was mistaken, for
Instead Of having the vast, silent nall
to herself Diana of the Tides" can
! look down from her snowy heights on
rows Of cases ranged along the sides
and down the center of the souse-cheese
floor.
And in the cases are dinosaurs Of the
tides that once ebbed and flowed over
cities. deserts and great plains.
A Diana riding the waves on a shell
drawn by white horses is perfectly
lovely to look at, of course, but when
it comes to fascination she simply isn't
a patch on a dinosaur grubbed up
from some everyday place in the west
which shows the difference between
mythology and the real thing and the
superiority of fossils to paint brushes.
From an accommodating set of labels
| tiles vary in size from a chicken to
eighty feet in length" A sea-living
| mammal from Alabama, for instance.
with its vertebrate trailing yards on the
ground. makes man. eating alligator
look like parlor pet, while a nearby
mastodon from the peat deposits of
Michigan puts a circus elephant in the
watch-charm class. This irst-family
specimen was contemporary with early
man" And the question is how did
early man like his company?
Colorado sandstone Is responsible for
IAN extinct f1esh-eating reptile whose
skeleton is a small matter of seventeen
feet four inches, while duck-billed thing
from Wyoming stands eight feet at the
hips and measures q stretch of more than
eight yards. One horned dinosaur has
six feet of skull to do his thinking with,
and Massachusetts, shows footprints be-
lieved to have been made by extinct rep
tiles and dinosaurs which walked on their
hind legs and had but three toes on their
hind feet" Who'd have thought 1t of
Boston! Kansas first representative at
the National Capital Is a birdie from
Logan county with wing spread of
about twenty-five feet" and for a close
neighbor there is a bunchy terror that
looks exactly like a
But by that time, maybe, a blue cloth
man will come and notify you that it is
time to close up. AS you leave the hall
you will give your parting look to Diana
| moon shadows and sunset glow, but
| Your minds eye will take with it un-
| forgettable visions of dinosaurs Of the
| tides that once ebbed and flowed over
places that we know as cities, deserts
and great plains.
| A pair of rubbers stood right there In
| the middle of the sidewalk on F street
1t was just at the hour when the mat
| inee crowds come f1ocking down the
street. bent on the most important thing
| in life, which Is, Of course. the pursuit
| of hot chocolate. The rubbers were Pc
| tite in size and had saucy air about
them. They stood right there in the act
| OF taking a step. II they had been
| dropped from a bag or package they
would have sprawled aimlessly on the
| been walking by themselves, as IL they
| had been protecting the feet of some in
visible person. and had suddenly stopped
| Sill in the act of taking a step.
| The matinee girls all stopped to look
at them. The young men made remarks.
| Old men stopped long enough to see
what the young folks were looking at.
| For five minutes those rubbers held a
| reception.
And then suddenly a man whose shoes
/ were at least three times as large as
| those rubbers made up his mind the rub
| bers were anybody's property. and, SHOW
| ing his way through the crowd, picked
| them up.
1t pays some people to rubber,