Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/776

704* of the subjects treated and others by the natures of the materials used.

For form's sake it is requisite to say that here as always those units of a society who make themselves distinct by performing functions of a certain kind, presently, along with separation from the rest, begin to unite with one another. The specialized individuals form a specialized aggregate.

When in the Middle Ages the artists employed as assistants to priests for ecclesiastical decoration became a class, they grew into something like guilds. Levasseur, quoting Laborde, says they were hardly distinguished from artisans: like them they formed corporations under the name of paintres, tailleurs d'ymaiges et voirriers. In Italy during the fourteenth century a Brotherhood of Painters arose, which, taking for its patron St. Luke the Evangelist, had for its purpose, partly mutual instruction and partly mutual assistance and protection.

That in modern times the tendency to integration has been illustrated all know. It needs only further to remark that the growth of the chief art corporations has been followed by the growth of minor art corporations, some of them specialized by the kinds of art practiced; and also that embodiment of the profession is now aided by art periodicals, and especially by one. The Artist, devoted to professional culture and interests.

is made in Prof. Frederick Starr's Comparative Religion Notes, in the Biblical World, of the important place in the ceremonials of the Indian tribes of the Southwest occupied by curious pictures or mosaics made of sand. Different colored sands are procured by pounding up the various kinds of rocks. The designs are made by qualified persons, according to a prescribed method, after preparatory purification. Colors and designs are symbolical. In making them the sand taken in the hand is allowed to run out between the thumb and forefinger along the lines to be produced. The practice is found among various pueblo peoples and among the Navajos; and notice is made of similar observances among the Hindus and Parsees; and sand pictures are made as a street amusement in Japan.

London Spectator gathers from a number of letters it has received that "a great many cultivated people like their small superstitions. . . . Some dislike trusting their reason wholly, because, they think, that way agnosticism may lie; some feel in their superstitious beliefs an antiquarian charm, or relation to their forebears; while others appear to have the feeling that, if they cleared the superstitions wholly out, their mental scenery would be rendered base and marred by sameness. . . . They do not all put the question, but all we think are inclined to ask us, as one rather clever old lady has done, what harm the petty superstitions do? Why not throw salt over your shoulder if you spill it?"