hund.
illustrations and of the business competition that has made it necessary to meet the demand . It is a record of the develop ment of the art of illustrating as it has grown through invention ,
discovery, and experiment from the first crude efforts to the high degree of excellence it has attained to -day both in regard to the illustration itself and to the accuracy, speed, and facility
with which it is reproduced . The illustration, better than any other record outside of the patent-office, shows the stage reached
by inventions at any specified time, — the development of aerial and of submarine navigation , as of all other modern inventions, ing but diverging tastes that at one extreme have insisted on higher artistic standards and that at the other faithfully reflect the vitiated taste and low standard that demand the Sunday comic supplement.97
It is an equally faithful record of the
changing tastes in the subjects chosen for illustration . If at one time the illustration catered to the morbid taste for pictures of accidents, hairbreadth escapes, encounters with wild beasts, and cannibalism ; 98 if it found humorous, and therefore illustrated ,
the movements of the insane and the feebleminded , the victims
of hysteria, epilepsy , alcoholism , torture, and all forms of human suffering, it to-day revels in depicting crimes, criminals, and the work of detectives, and in purveying to the vulgarity , the ignorance, and the low moral and artistic standards of those interested in the comic supplement . If the evil influence of illustrations of crime and of criminals
has often been noted , scarcely less to be deprecated is the ex aggerated idea of their own importance given themselves and their families by the illustrations of school-boys prominent in school athletics, of society debutantes, of prize-winning babies,
and contestants for the honors in school gardens and farm crops. The illustration thus records the same tendencies as are found
in other formsof news to represent the abnormal, the conspicuous, and the unusual. In itself it is an interesting record of an educa 97 “ The most dangerous influences at work against the art of the future are the comic supplements of the Sunday papers.” — W . S . Perry, New York Times, March 5 , 1916 .
98 Many illustrations of this are given by Mason Jackson , The Pictorial Press Its Origin and Progress, London , 1885.
