k, clear in outline,
simple and distinctive in form, properly grouped and spaced.

The various attempts to standardize type-sizes and to adopt a suitable
notation for them have been limited hitherto to the sizes of the type-body
and bear only indirectly on the size of the actual letter. More or less
arbitrary names--such as minion, bourgeois, brevier, and nonpareil,--were
formerly used; but what is called the point-system is now practically
universal, although its unit, the "point," is not everywhere the same.
Roughly speaking, a point is one-seventy-second of an inch, so that in
three-point type, for example, the thickness of the type-body, from the
top to the bottom of the letter on its face, is one-twenty-fourth of an
inch. But on this type-body the face may be large or small--although of
course, it cannot be larger than the body,--and the size of the letters
called by precisely the same name in the point notation may vary within
pretty wide limits. There is no accepted notation for the size of the
letters themselves, and this fact tells, more eloquently than words, that
the present sizes of type are standardized and defined for compositors
only, not for readers, and still less for scientific students of the
effect upon the readers' eyes of different arrangements of the printed
page.

What seems to have been the first attempt to define sizes of type suitable
for school grades was made fifteen years ago by Mr Edward R. Shaw in his
"School Hygiene"; he advocates sizes from eighteen-point in the first year
to twelve-point for the fourth. "Principals, teachers, and school
superintendents," he says, "should possess a millimetre measure and a
magnifying glass, and should subject every book presented for their
examination to a test to determine whether the size of the letters and the
width of the leading are of such dimensions as will not prove injurious to
the eyes of children." To this list, librarians might be well added--not
to speak of authors, editors, and publishers. In a subsequent part of his
chapter on "Eyesight and Hearing," from which the above sentence is
quoted, appears a test of illumination suggested by "The Medical Record"
of Strasburg, which may serve as a "horrid example" in some such way as
did the drunken brother who accompanied the temperance lecturer. According
to this authority, if a pupil is unable to read diamond
type--four-and-one-half-point--"at twelve-inch distance and without
strain," the illu