e
general collection have done well here, while old favorites have not been
taken out. Such facts as these mean little with so limited a collection.
Until readers awake to the dangers of small print and the comfort of large
type there will not be sufficient pressure on our publishers to induce
them to put forth more books suitable for tired eyes. It is probably too
much to expect that the trade itself will try to push literature whose
printed form obeys the rules of ocular hygiene. All that we can reasonably
ask is that type-size shall be reported on in catalogues, so that those
who want books in large type may know what is obtainable and where to go
for it.

It has often been noted that physicians are the only class of professional
men whose activities, if properly carried on, tend directly to make the
profession unnecessary. Medicine tends more and more to be preventive
rather than curative. We must therefore look to the oculists to take the
first steps towards lessening the number of their prospective patients by
inculcating rational notions about the effects of the printed page on the
eye. Teachers, librarians, parents, the press--all can do their part. And
when a demand for larger print has thus been created the trade will
respond. Meanwhile, libraries should be unremitting in their efforts to
ascertain what material in large type already exists, to collect it, and
to call attention to it in every legitimate way.

THE MAGIC CASEMENT[16]

[16] Read before the Town and Gown Club, St. Louis.

Anyone who talks or writes about the "movies" is likely to be
misunderstood. There is little to be said now about the moving picture as
a moving picture, unless one wants to discuss its optics or mechanics. The
time is past when anyone went to see a moving picture as a curiosity. It
was once the eighth wonder of the world; it long ago abdicated that
position to join its dispossessed brothers the telephone, the X-ray, the
wireless telegraph and the phonograph. What we now go to see is not the
moving picture, but what the moving picture shows us; it is no more than a
window through which we gaze--the poet's "magic casement" opening
(sometimes) "on the foam of perilous seas." We may no more praise or
condemn the moving picture for what it shows us than we may praise or
condemn a proscenium arch or the glass in a show window.

The critic who thinks that the movies are lowering our tastes, or doing
anything else objec