cutting, and to it it is superior in the matter of accuracy. Time, labor, and expense are also largely saved by the scientific use of the camera. For example, in order to produce a figure of the skeleton of some such medium-sized mammal as a cat for an octavo work upon osteology, the reduction and draughting often occupied an artist several days; the cost, in addition to his time and labor expended, ranging all the way from ten to twenty-five dollars; whereas now, by the use of the camera, not only are greater accuracy and beauty insured, but the resulting half-tone obtained is at a very moderate pecuniary outlay. In the matter of illustrating sections of bones there is absolutely no comparison at all, for it is quite out of the question for any artist to copy the delicate internal cancellous tissue of the bone, while a photographic picture, occupying less than an hour to secure, will exhibit all this detail with the greatest sharpness and fidelity. Passing to another field in practical zoölogical pictography, we find the works upon natural history published during the latter part of the last decade, in many instances, filled with figures of mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish, to say nothing of those of the invertebrata and plants, where not only the specimens are malproportioned, drawn in impossible attitudes, characterless, but are even in some cases totally irrecognizable. Then these figures too, or the wretched class of them to which reference is made, had come to be a species of authors' heirlooms, passing from one work on to the pages of the next published one, and so on, till they found their way even into lexicons and text-books intended for the instruction of students in schools and colleges. All this is especially objectionable, for it is fraught with the danger of teaching erroneous ideas in the very important matter of the appreciation of correct form or morphological accuracy in natural objects, giving our youth false notions of the appearances of animals of all kinds and descriptions.
Let any one examine, for example, the figures in. literature of such mammals as the walrus or the seals, published not longer ago than forty years, and my meaning will at once be made clear. Indeed, it is only in very recent time, comparatively, that we begin to see anything like correct pictures of the fur seal, and the camera has played a very important part in securing these. Among birds, and particularly among reptiles and fish, the same objectionable features are frequently noticeable, and of the charge of all this the present writer considers himself by no means guiltless, for before the photographic camera came to his aid not a few of his own published figures of vertebrates would without question have passed into the same category. Since the camera has come to his aid, however, these have been supplanted by a class of photographic pictures of living
