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Moreover, in those ages, all artistic representation was highly conventional. What would the Oriental artist who designed the first willow-pattern plate give us by way of a picture of a torpedo-boat destroyer? How far an ingrained instinct for the conventional treatment of things may lead the artist astray, was well shown in some of the Japanese and Chinese illustrations of events in the war between China and Japan in 1894-95. Many of the most curious of these were executed by eye-witnesses of the operations commemorated, and were obviously intended to be honest records, so far as the conventionalities permitted. Where absolute ignorance of the real nature of the object represented has co-operated with conventionalism as abject as any that ever limited a Chinaman, no result that can be very edifying to the modern eye is to be expected.