Fairchild: Visible Records of Heredity 



175 



to himself, "A cane is about three feet 

 long — this Httle tree is taller than that, 

 yes it must be about four feet high, 

 and that would be about so tall," and 

 measures the height with his hands. 

 If a child had been standing by the 

 little plant or a dog or domestic animal 

 of some sort, the approximate size of 

 the plant would have been realized 

 unconsciously, regardless of the fact 

 that one does not know the size of the 

 child or dog. 



There are of course cases in which 

 absolute accuracy is desirable, and in 

 such photographs a scale at the very 

 edge of the picture may be necessary, 

 but ordinarily the general impression 

 must be depended upon to give the 

 size, for the general reader does not 

 stop to analyse a photograph. A scale 

 photographed at the edge of each 

 photograph which can be cut off when 

 it is used for other than record purposes 

 is of course an excellent precaution 

 though in most cases a statement of size 

 is just as good. 



If you pose a man or woman for a 

 scale, be sure to have an attractive 

 one, though don't do as one person I 

 know did. He asked such a beautiful 

 girl to hold his fruit for him that no one 

 looked at the fruit at all! On the other 

 hand, thousands of remarkable photo- 

 graphs are ruined by the hired man in 

 his glaring white shirt sleeves; and a hat 

 thrown on the ground, for some reason 

 or other seems to distort most photo- 

 graphs of plants or animals. One 

 wonders perhaps why the man put his 

 hat there. 



The careful use of part of a human 

 figure can be made to give scale, but 

 it must be very carefully done; to 

 ruthlessly chop off a man's head in a 

 picture gives the reader something of 

 the same kind of a shock that the 

 photograph of a detached arm does in 

 a medical publication. Don't do 

 anything that will deflect the attention 

 from the object to be shown. If it is a 

 small object, get close to it and make 

 it cover a large part of the plate. If 

 some one must hold it, show him 

 looking at it in an interested way, and 

 the eye of the reader will follow his 



gaze, but don't unbalance the picture 

 by putting too much of the man in and 

 too little of the object. Human eyes 

 staring at you from a photograph will 

 always unbalance it. You must meet 

 them unconsciously with yours and fail 

 to see the object which the photograph 

 was taken to show. 



There seems to be some relation 

 between the size of the object and the 

 amount of the background space 

 around it. If this space is little, the 

 impression of largeness is given. A 

 cherry which is enlarged to nearly 

 cover a 5 X 7 plate looks as large as a 

 pumpkin, and yet the enlargement is 

 only 3 diameters while a pumpkin oc- 

 cupying the same space on a 5 x 7 plate 

 gives a confused idea of its size though 

 the object is shown only ^- its natural 

 size. There is a mysterious psychologi- 

 cal relation here which I wish some one 

 more skilled than I am in such matters 

 would explain. By trial and a study 

 of the effects, one can get approxi- 

 mately the right proportion, so that 

 one unfamiliar with the object gets at 

 a glance a reasonably correct impres- 

 sion of its size. 



Remember that in the almost micro- 

 scopic details of a head of wheat or a 

 hairy leaf are to be found fascinating 

 forms which to the layman are new. 

 There are few less interesting photo- 

 graphs, however, than those of a whole 

 wheat head with its long awns because 

 it has to be so small that it appears, — 

 well, it appears to be nothing but a 

 head of wheat, — whereas the fascinat- 

 ing richness of form to be found in a 

 head of wheat is well known to every 

 hybridizer of this important cereal. 

 The public at large is still puzzled to 

 tell a head of wheat from a head of 

 rye or barley. Get enlarged photo- 

 graphs whenever they will show the 

 new point to be illustrated and devise 

 new methods of showing off the old 

 forms. A photograph of a cow for 

 example, to the layman is nothing but 

 a cow, but a cow's udder or tail he 

 has probably never seen photographs 

 of. While small photographs can 

 be enlarged it is a mistake to think 

 that clearness is not lost in the en- 



