PEACE has her victories no less renowned than war, and of the means by which peace wins her victories by far the most potent in these modern times is the press. It is in the United States that this great growth has reached its fullest development. American newspapers, acting on and being reacted upon by the national development, have reached an astonishing excellence as news sheets pure and simple, far outstripping the papers of all other countries in this respect. With the demand for newspapers has grown, though in a less degree, the taste for reading magazines, in which, as it were, are sifted by week and month the more salient

interests of the community. Lastly, as time passes and the relative importance of events and their interdependence become better appreciated, the final boiling down is done in books, technical and historical, and so in no small measure is our experience handed on to posterity.

Side by side with the wonderful inventiveness that has created the printing-presses of to-day has gone a similar ingenuity devising the means to fix and similarly multiply the artist's thoughts, until artist and writer stand on almost an equal footing as regards their reaching and influencing the public.

Like everything else under the sun, this has been a growth, although a very rapid one, and as with many another necessary of our daily life, the invention that made it possible was never dreamed of in connection with it. The men of Paris who scoffed at Daguerre's sun pictures were the descendants of the men who called Galvani the frog's dancing master-and whose ancestors are they?

Before photography was called in to aid the engraver, illustration was difficult for the artist, and very unsatisfactory when accomplished. Every one is familiar

with the funny-looking effects of light and shade and form old wood-cuts offer as aids to the text. And no wonder. The artist must first draw his picture on the block of wood in which it was to be cut. Then the graver turned himself loose on it. Where the artist had put in trees, the engraver cut in certain shaped lines, that he had been taught to use to represent trees. Where the artist had delineated a man, the engraver made certain other shaped lines, designed to give the best relief and color to, and always used by him to represent, a man. And so on through the restricted number of objects of common interest likely to be set down for illustrative purposes in those unhappy days.

Drawn by Tappan Adney.

From Our Animal Friends. "THE CATBIRD."

But some genius put a sensitive photographing film on a piece of boxwood, and photographed a drawing thereon. From that moment the relation between artist and engraver began to change; until, from the artist being compelled to turn his pencil to suit the block, and having to trust to the engraver to leave out slips and not put in more than he ought, and being generally at the engraver's mercy, since his drawing was destroyed as the block was cut, the engraver now has to reproduce the drawing exactly as to line and con