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expressive of thought, feeling and character, almost as much so as 
painting and sculpture. 
Another classification separates all art into groups of technic, es- 
thetic and phonetic, the first being those that minister to the pri- 
mary wants, the second to the esthetic, and the third to those that 
express ideas by colors, forms and words—in fact, language. But, 
actually, no positive limits can be assigned to these varieties as a 
question of fact, and it is rather a matter of degree than of classifi- 
cation. While it is highly productive of thought to make this 
effort to classify, and is useful as bringing out more clearly the 
underlying principles of art, it is evident that a deep-grounded 
philosophic classification has not as yet been reached. 
Dr. John G. Morris, having been next introduced, presented 
a paper on “The Nature and Design of the Historical Societies 
of Our Country, and the Invaluable Benefit They Have Con- 
ferred on the Community,” which is as follows: 
No one can reasonably object when a public speaker employs the 
heaven-inspired language of the Hebrew poet in illustration of a 
subject altogether secular and historical. In the loftiest strains 
which his language afforded, he invites all men of religious taste 
and piety to visit the magnificent house of worship at Jerusalem— 
to extend their walk around the impregnable walls and their massive 
abutments—to measure by the eye their height and thickness—to 
look upon the tall towers and their broad bulwarks—the ponderous 
gates of brass and all the other external wonders of that wonderful 
edifice—but the admiring visitor is invited to pass through the gates, 
and to contemplate the magnificent structures erected around the 
sanctuary, the grandest of all, and then to gaze with rapture on the 
unsurpassed splendor and ravishing architectural glories of that 
house of God—and why all this? Not merely to gratify a culti- 
vated taste, but to tell it to the generation following—to write the 
history of it that subsequent ages might know what had been done 
by their fathers. 
And this is the province of the historian of to-day, as it has been 
of all preceding times—to verify doubtful facts, to develop and re- 
cord unwritten events, to correct popular errors, to authenticate dis- 
