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basest criminal sometimes does things 

 which are right and may exhibit the 

 highest traits of courage, honesty or 

 other commendable quality. If you 

 know of one or more persons whose 

 entire previous life has been exemplary, 

 but who go wrong in some one or two 

 points, and if you know of some bad 

 persons who have done commendable 

 acts, is that a good reason for saying 

 that a generally bad life is fully equiv- 

 alent to a generally good life? Sup- 

 pose you drive into the country and 

 pass a garden that is a perfect model ; 

 suppose you ascertain that the owner 

 of that garden dug up the ground with 

 a piece of board and hoed it with an 

 iron hoop? You drive on and find a 

 garden that is in bad condition through 

 negligence, and you learn that the 

 owner plowed the ground with a steam 

 plow and hoed it with the best grade 

 of patent hoe. Is the thrifty garden a 

 good argument in favor of using crude 

 tools? 



Suppose you meet a boy with an 

 alder pole, a tow line, and a bent pin, 

 but with a long string of fish, and a 

 little farther down the road you find a 

 boy with a bamboo rod, a patent au- 

 tomatic reel, but no fish, and he tells 

 you that it is not a good day for fish, 

 will you then irrevocably decide to 

 own only an alder pole, a tow line and 

 a bent pin, and never to try to fish 

 with anything better? 



It is possible to do good work with 

 the poorest tools. It is possible for a 

 generally bad man to do an act in the 

 highest degree commendable. It is pos- 

 sible for the holiest man to fall, and 

 even to commit the basest crimes but 

 these are not the slightest argument 

 against the general principle under 

 consideration. 



The manufacturers tell you that the 

 anastigmat lens does far better work 

 than the rectilinear. They are wholly 

 right and wholly wrong. It will and 

 it won't. I have seen, and have myself 

 produced the very finest work with a 

 rectilinear lens, and I have, even with 

 the best lenses sometimes achieved 

 failures that made me want to shut the 

 camera in a closet and not see jt again 



for a week. To come directly to the 

 pointed question that you ask, I reply 

 that I know it because I have had 

 twenty-one years of experience. I know 

 more completely and more postively on 

 account of that experience, than I 

 should know if I had seen and had care- 

 fully examined your own and Mr. 

 's outfit. A general principle, es- 

 pecially when discovered after almost 

 a quarter of a century's experience, is 

 worth more than any person's single 

 observation of my work or of 

 yours. I presume always to advise the 

 camerist to lay aside the rectilinear and 

 get an anastigmat, for the reason that I 

 lost the greater part of my camera life 

 because I was not told about the su- 

 perior advantages of the anastigmat. 

 I was deluded by my pride in certain 

 fine work that I had done. I held it 

 up exultingly and said, "There, what's 

 the use of buying an anastigmat when 

 one can do work like that with an or- 

 dinary lens." And even to-day, after 

 many years of experience with the an- 

 astigmat, I find occasionally among my 

 camera souvenirs, a bit of high-quality 

 work that makes me think that pos- 

 sibly, from Mr. 's and Mr. Kel- 



logg's and perhaps other persons' point 

 of view they are right. Then you in- 

 quire I surmise, "What's the use of 

 straining every nerve to buy an anas- 

 tigmat." Why not tell the thousands 

 of camera users with the ordinary 

 lenses how they can do better work, 

 and not urge upon them the impossi- 

 bility of purchasing a high-grade lens. 

 I do tell them, have told them, and will 

 continue to tell them. It does not re- 

 quire much space to tell them. The 

 whole thing is just this. Put heart and 

 gumption back of your lens and you 

 can do good work with any lens. Why 

 don't I tell the boy with a dirty face 

 that he can always be happy if he 

 keeps his face dirty, because I know 

 that some boys with dirty faces are 

 happy? To generalize too freely from 

 "events viewed unequally," is danger- 

 ous, and you, my dear friend are on 

 dangerous ground not to say thin ice, 

 when you depend so much on an isola- 

 ted example. 



I once heard of a recently graduated 



