Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/81

REFRACTION consciousness of things rather than any genuine vision of things themselves. It is curious when you come to think of it, how many untold centuries it has taken mankind to recognize this simple visual phenomenon, which every one of the race must have been experiencing ten thousand times a day for ten million years; and how few there are even to-day who are fully cognizant of it.

A gentleman of marked intelligence and culture once berated me for what he termed the artist's impudence in giving to the public a smudge of greenish brown or of gray up against the sky and asking them to accept it as a tree. "Why," he said, "I can see every leaf on that oak tree in the meadow yonder. And so can any one whose eyesight is normal." [51]