Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/788

768, Browning, Longfellow, Bryant, Poe, Dante, Virgil, Horace, Homer, Hume, Gibbon, Macaulay, Motley, Prescott, Bancroft, Livy, Herodotus, Cicero, Carlyle, Webster, Irving, Emerson, Pascal, Voltaire, Ruskin, Plato, Kant, Mill, Darwin, Spencer, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Cervantes, Hugo, George Eliot, Bulwer, Kingsley, Hawthorne, Bronte", Black, Collins, Dumas. Besides these, or many like them, he has read a great number of contemporary writings, including novels, travels, biographies, essays, philosophy, science, and art. New books, reviews, and articles, relating to his profession or specialty he must, of course, be constantly reading. Besides these he must at least glance over some of the leading articles in the best of the hundreds of weekly, monthly, and quarterly periodicals, magazines, and reviews. Then there is his private correspondence with daily letters to read and write. With all this mass of reading, however, he might not become quite a reading machine, and might find a little time for the use and cultivation of other bodily organs than the eye, were it not for the daily paper. The tireless steam press ruthlessly grinding out some thousand large pages per hour has become a kind of tyrant rather than a servant of man. By what curious perversion of modern conscience have we learned to believe it our daily duty to read that A. B. robbed a bank in New York and that C. D. wrote a book in Boston, that E. F. married a wife in Maine and that G. H. killed one in Missouri, that the weather is colder in California and warmer in France? But if we have learned to skip the crimes and casualties, we consider it our bounden duty daily to scan at least the field of politics. What one reads others must write and print. Day and night, therefore, editors, reporters, correspondents, and printers are busy with eye and hand.

As a result partly of our eye-mindedness, partly of our conditions of life, a number of arts both æsthetic and useful have sprung into being or into new life, which promise still further to increase the use of the eye. Among these we may mention the art of decoration exhibited in architecture; in the internal embellishment of dwellings, churches, and public buildings; in dress, unless we rank this as a separate fine art; in stage decoration, in floriculture, and in many other ways. There is next the art of illustration, which has enormously increased the circulation of certain classes of books, magazines, weekly and even daily papers. Then there is photography, an art which has lately received a wonderful expansion, made popular on the one hand by cheap and rapid processes, on the other hand applied to the highest scientific purposes. No less have drawing and designing extended their fields in every direction. Type-writing as a brand-new art has sprung into existence; and, finally, the art of advertising has gained a distinctive place, scores of pages in a single magazine being covered with