THE CARE OF PICTURES AND PRINTS. 83 



ers and compounders state that liquors made from pure cologne or 

 neutral spirits are the purest liquors that can be found. That may be 

 true ; also, sulphuric acid and aqua-fortis may and presumably are 

 pure, but they are, nevertheless, dangerous and deadly poisons. 



This neutral spirit has been robbed of all its native richness and 

 reduced to a skeleton of extreme poverty by eliminating its natural 

 oils and leaving it with a harsh, cutting, penetrating nature, and when 

 taken internally it produces the worst effects upon the tissues. The 

 natural oils in the materials from which alcoholic liquors are produced 

 are the oils that have the greatest natural affinity for that particular 

 kind of liquor, and if permitted to remain where they belong, when 

 taken into the stomach in a refined condition, properly combined and 

 assimilated, are bland and sedative in their effects, and any spirit that 

 has been deprived of them is not fit to enter the human stomach. 



-- 



THE CAEE OF PICTURES AND PRINTS. 



By PHILIP GILBEET HAMERTON. 



AMONG the most curious apparent inconsistencies of human na- 

 ture is the possibly complete independence of the productive 

 and the conservative states of mind. It seems as if the talent for pro- 

 ducing things often led, of itself, to a carelessness about their preser- 

 vation, perhaps from a feeling that it is easy to replace what may 

 happen to be deteriorated. The most conspicuous instance of this 

 temper is that of Turner, among artists. He was the most productive 

 of painters and the most accumulative, liking to keep his own works 

 about him much more than painters generally do ; and yet at the same 

 time he does not appear to have given a thought to the preservation of 

 the works he so greatly valued. His pictures were carelessly kept in 

 a gallery that was never repaired ; his drawings were never arranged 

 till Mr. Ruskin arranged them six years after Turner's death, and it 

 cost Mr. Ruskin a whole autumn and winter (1857), with the help of 

 two assistants, working " every day, all day long, and often far into 

 the night," to convert the Turnerian mess of confusion into order. 



Had it been confusion or disorder simply, the evil would have been 

 completely remediable by careful labor ; but unfortunately the same 

 carelessness that led to disorder involved carelessness about preserva- 

 tion. Many of the drawings were eaten away by damp and mildew, 

 "and falling into dust at the edges, in capes and bays of fragile de- 

 cay." Others were worm-eaten, some were mouse-eaten, "many torn 

 half-way through." Turner's way of keeping his drawings was to 

 roll them up in bundles and cram them into drawers. The rolled 

 bundles do not even appear to have been protected by paper closed at 

 the end against dust, and the squeezing seems to have flattened them ; 



