624 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



other, certain thoughts about those things began to take shape in my 

 mind. 



Of course, the sounds I heard had not the smallest likeness to the 

 things called up by them in my mind. To an Italian peasant, or to 

 Archimedes of Syracuse, they would have been as unintelligible as 

 the chattering of a magpie. They were purely arbitrary or conven- 

 tional ; yet, much of our education had been devoted to their mastery. 

 Nevertheless, as a means for expressing thought, they were, in the 

 present case, quite inadequate. The ideas aroused in my mind were 

 confused and fragmentary, and altogether unsatisfactory. The images 

 lacked precision. Had my friend resorted to writing a description of 

 the invention, in either English, French, German, Latin, or Greek, 

 using in every case a set of purely conventional symbols (to represent 

 the other set of conventional sounds), which we had both spent years 

 in getting some knowledge of, he would have succeeded little better. 

 Whether sj)eakmg or writing, much of his thought he could not clothe 

 in words. He, therefore, abandoned the wholly conventional, or ver- 

 bal, art of expression and turned to the pictorial. 



But, here he soon confessed that his education was deficient. He 

 had never studied the art of representing objects having three dimen- 

 sions on a surface having but two, and hence he was ignorant of the 

 methods he ought to adopt to express by drawings the objects he 

 was thinking of. However, I caught more of his meaning from some 

 crude attempts at sketching than I had from all his talk. A few lines 

 were luminous with meaning ; yet, they left far too much for me to 

 supply by my imagination ; hence, my visitor withdrew and sent me 

 a full set of what we called " working drawings," made by the in- 

 ventor, who was a draughtsman. 



These drawings, though a sort of ocular resemblance to the things 

 signified, were still half conventional, and required, on my part, a 

 certain amount of training to enable me fully to understand them ; 

 this, fortunately, I had received, and, through the art of expression 

 embodied in them, I gained a tolerably clear idea of the thought of 

 the inventor. "With scarce a written or spoken word, they expressed 

 that thought far more clearly and fully than any merely verbal de- 

 scription could do ; they showed the relations of parts which were 

 beyond the reach of words. 



But my friend was not content to stop there. The drawings had 

 been but partially intelligible to him with their " plans, elevations, and 

 sections," and, judging me by himself, he believed that a third art of 

 expression would outvalue both the others ; he, therefore, invited me 

 to call at a shop and examine a specimen of the device itself, produced 

 by a skilled mechanic. The real article, which is the mechanic's art 

 of expression, proved to be an improvement even upon the thought of 

 the inventor. The latter had not been a mechanic, and he had made 

 the sort of mistakes that draughtsmen, who are not something of 



