38 THE WONDERFUL CENTURY. CHAP. v. 



from, anything that went before it, but is a totally new 

 departure. From that early period when the men of the 

 stone age rudely outlined the mammoth and the reindeer 

 on stone or ivory, the only means of representing men 

 and animals, natural scenery, or the great events of hu- 

 man history, had been through the art of the painter or 

 the sculptor. It is true that the highest Greek, or Me- 

 diaeval, or Modern art, cannot be equalled by the produc- 

 tions of the photographic camera; but great artists are 

 few and far between, and the ordinary, or even the 

 talented draughtsman can give us only suggestions of 

 what he sees, so modified by his peculiar mannerism as 

 often to result in a mere caricature of the truth. Should 

 some historian in Japan study the characteristics of 

 English ladies at two not remote epochs, as represented, 

 say, by Frith and by Du Maurier, he would be driven 

 to the conclusion that there had been a complete change 

 of type, due to the introduction of some foreign race, in 

 the interval between the works of these two artists. 

 From such errors as this we shall be saved by photog- 

 raphy ; and our descendants in the middle of the coming 

 century will be able to see how much, and what kind, of 

 change really does occur from age to age. 



The importance of this is well seen by comparing any 

 of the early works on Ethnology, illustrated by por- 

 traits intended to represent the different " types of man- 

 kind," with recent volumes which give us copies of 

 actual photographs of the same types; when we shall see 

 how untrue to nature are the former, due probably to 

 the artist having delineated those extreme forms, either 

 of ugliness or of beauty, that most attracted his atten- 

 tion, and to his having exaggerated even these. Thus 



