expense of the original work, which not merely atones for the loss but supplies in its place an intrinsic work of art, such exceptions in no way affect the argument.

The inferiority is not in the method of reproduction, which has been vastly Improved, but in the originals to be reproduced. And the key to this mysterious decadence of illustration while so many excellent illustrators are found in our midst, will be discovered wheu we compare the illustrations of the sixties with those of the present day; for whereas the former, without exception, are in line, the latter, in the main, are in half-tone. More than to anything else the deterioration of illustration is due to the substitution of that bastard In art, the wash-drawing, for the pure design in line. This preponderance of wash-drawings in the pages of our magazines and illustrated weeklies is the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual degeneration. False ideals are responsible for the change which has resulted in decay. Modern illustrators are apt to aim at truth instead of beauty, forgetting that if truth be the goal of science, beauty is the goal of art, and that if, as Keats has said, beauty and truth are ultimately one, nevertheless artists and scientists travel by different roads to the common end. Moreover the hack-illustrator of to-day seems to adopt the camera as his standard of truth, and to endeavor to obtain with his indian-ink The Academy.

an effect resembling as nearly as possible the reproduction of a photograph. Instead of trying to decorate a page, the hack-illustrator would persuade us that he has "snap-shotted" some incident or scene described by his author.

Illustrated journalism has been de graded and deprived of all artistic interest by the wholesale employment of photographs instead of drawings, but the evil influence of the camera has not ended here, since the degeneration is spreading from the journals and their readers to the artists who engage in unwise competition against the photograph. The dull uniformity of our sixpenny illustrated monthlies and weeklies, brought about by their publication of similar and often identical photographs, is now matched by the monotonous impersonality of the wash-drawings by the few illustrators for whom employment is still found. With the exception of Punch-a last stronghold of the line draughtsman against the invading forces of the wash-drawing and half-tone block-it would be difficult to name a single English periodical whose illustrations are an attraction to an educated purchaser. Nowadays the patrous of illustration confine their attention to books, or to American periodicals, in which the standard of illustration is admittedly higher, not because America has better illustrators, but because American editors have better taste and shrewder artistic judgment than our own.

I am he: goggled and unashamed. Furrel also am I. stop-watchel and horse-powerful.

Millions admit my sway-on both sides

of the road.

The Plutocrat has money: I have motors.

The Democrat has the rates; so have I -two-one for use and one fɔr County Courts.

The Autocrat is dead, but I-I increase and multiply.

I have taken his place.

I blow my horn and the people scatter.

1 stand still and everything trembles.

I move and kill dogs.

I skid and chickens die.

I pass swiftly from place to place, and horses bolt in dust storms which cover the land.

I make the dust storms.

For I am Omnipotent; I make everything.

I make dust, I make smell, I make noise.

And I go forward, ever forward, and pass through or over almost everything.

"Over or Through" is my motto. The roads were made for me; years ago they were made.

Punch.

Wise rulers saw me coming and made

roads.

Now that I am come, they go on making roads-making them up.

For I break things.

Roads I break and Rules of the Road.
Statutory limits were made for me.
I break them.

I break the dull silence of the country. Sometimes I break down, and thousands flock round me, so that I dislocate the traffic.

But I am the Traffic.

I am I and She is She-the Rest get out of the way.

Truly, the hand which rules the Motor rocks the World.

been entered into or made by Great Britain and other States from the fifteenth century to the present era.

a

G. P. Putnam's Sons announce work entitled "Our Struggle for the Fourteenth Colony: Canada and the American Revolution," by Justin H. Smith, Professor of Modern History in Dartmouth College, whose "Arnold's March from Cambridge to Quebec" and "The Troubadours at Home" were also issued by Messrs. Putnam. The new work will be in two illustrated volumes, and will be based almost entirely on first-hand material. A thorough search was made in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain for MSS. relating to the efforts made from 1774 to 1783 to incorporate Canada in the American Union, and more than 1,400 new documents were found.

An

English house announces the early publication of an illustrated travel book by C. W. L. Bulpett, entitled "A Picnic Party in Wildest Africa," being a sketch of a winter's trip to some of the unknown waters of the Upper Nile. The expedition was organized by Mr. W. N. McMillan, an experienced American traveller, and had for its object the surveying of the Musha and Boma plateaux. Seeing that one of the caravans marched thirty-eight days on half-rations, largely through a country flooded by incessant rain, the trip could not have been altogether a picnic, but it appears to have been a great success. Mounts Ungwala and Naita were ascended, and hundreds of square miles of previously unexplored country were surveyed and mapped.

E. P. Dutton & Co. open the year's new books with the following, among others: "The Historical Study of the Mother Tongue. An introduction to Philological Method," by Henry Cecil

Wyld, Baines Professor of the English Language and Philology in the niversity of Liverpool; "Six Lectures on Painting Delivered to the Students of the Royal Academy of Arts in London," by George Clausen, A.R.A., R.W.S., Professor of Painting in the Royal Academy; "Aims and Ideals in Art," eight lectures delivered to students of the Royal Academy by George Clausen; "The Roman Capitol in Ancient and Modern Times," the Citadel, the Temples, the Senatorial Palace, the Palace of the Conservators, the Museum, by E. Rodocanachi, translated from the French by Frederick Lawton, M.A.; and a new edition of "The Thread of Gold," with a new introduction by the author, Mr. Arthur C. Benson.

Professor John Franklin Genung of Amherst, whose studies and translations of the book of Job and Ecclesiastes have been greatly enjoyed by Biblical students, carries these researches still farther in a volume on "The Hebrew Literature of Wisdom" which embodies a series of lectures, delivered at different times to Providence, Amherst and Boston audiences. The Old Testament books which are grouped for study under this general designation are Job, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes and the apocryphal books Ecclesiasticus and the Wisdom of Solomon. The Epistle of James is taken as a specimen of New Testament wisdom literature. Professor Genung does not busy himself with the niceties of Biblical criticism. His quest is for the literary and spiritual values of the group of writings which he studies. He writes with freedom and yet with reverence, with the insight of a poet and the painstaking care of a close student. The result is a volume which is a positive contribution to the understanding of the sacred writings. Houghton, Mifflin & Co.