Page:Theory and Practice of Handwriting.djvu/92

74 Desk do you use? How does it answer? Is it adjustable, rigid, durable, reliable, convenient, and efficient? Again and again are the changes rung on these questions yet how seldom are the answers satisfactory. The desk is the most essential, expensive, and important article of furniture connected with the art of writing. Upon the correct and hygienic construction of the desk depend almost vital issues, not solely with regard to the caligraphy, but more specifically to the health and well-being of the writers. Human skill and ingenuity have been lavished upon these articles to render them as perfect as the most stringent demands could require. On the continent, where the interest excited has been of the deepest character, Doctors of Philosophy and of Medicine have vied with each other in efforts to evolve the most perfect and effective desk possible for school use. The almost unanimous verdict is in favour of a low desk that shall permit the arms of the writer to rest naturally thereon, when he is sitting erect, without either raising or depressing the shoulders, and although this end is seldom actually and individually attained in large schools it can be approximated to very nearly. These low desks about which there has been, and still continues, such a fever of excitement have not had a sufficiently long test to prove them to be altogether advantageous and superior to those that are higher. It is still a moot question whether the support which the writer receives from the back rest is superior to the rest afforded by the arms when they are placed upon the desk to counterbalance the weight of the body as it is inclined forward in the act of writing. The great weight of evidence nevertheless is in