icture than to illustrating the text.

It has often been suggested that the art of printing is, after all, but
a questionable blessing on account of the error and the evil
disseminated by it. Without going into that question, I think that we
may find that the art of printing with movable type has led to some
neglect of the art of expressing ourselves pictorially, and that the
apparently inexorable necessity of running every word and thought into
uniform lines, has cramped and limited our powers of expression, and of
communicating ideas to each other.

Let us begin at the lowest step of the artistic ladder, and consider
some forms of illustration which are within the reach of nearly every
writer for the press. With the means now at command for reproducing any
lines drawn or written, in perfect fac-simile, mounted on square blocks
to range with the type, and giving little or no trouble to the printer,
there is no question that we should more frequently see the hand work of
the writer as well as of the artist appearing on the page. For example:
it happens sometimes in a work of fiction, or in the record of some
accident or event, that it is important to the clear understanding of
the text, to know the exact position of a house, say at a street corner,
and also (as in the case of a late trial for arson) which way the wind
blew on a particular evening. Words are powerless to explain the
position beyond the possibility of doubt or misconstruction; and yet
words are, and have been, used for such purposes for hundreds of years,
because it is "the custom."

[Illustration]

But if it were made plain that where words fail to express a meaning
easily, a few lines, such as those above, drawn in ink on ordinary
paper, may be substituted (and, if sent to the printer with the
manuscript, will appear in fac-simile on the proof with the printed
page), I think a new light may dawn on many minds, and new methods of
expression come into vogue.

This illustration (which was written on the sheet of MS.) is one
example, out of a hundred that might be given, where a diagram should
come to the aid of the verbal description, now that the reproduction of
lines for the press is no longer costly, and the blocks can be printed,
if necessary, on rapidly revolving cylinders, which (by duplicating) can
produce in a night 100,000 copies of a newspaper.

Before exploring some of the possibilities of illustration, it may be
interesting to glance a