some considerable class of persons. What, then, is the Art problem of the day? How are we affected by it? How should we benefit by its solution?
A century ago the people of these islands were in the main a country-living folk ; they are now a town-living. Steam and machinery have effected this change. Our forefathers knew from long-experience how to live in the country with comfort. The whole apparatus and circumstance of country life was harmoniously developed. With town life this is not as yet the case. The last half-century has been occupied with the rapid buikling of towns, with getting them paved and drained, and supplied with gas, water, and police, with making railroads from one to another, and generally with supplying the bare necessaries of existence to the people of a new epoch. Moreover, the methods and processes of manufacture have been revolutionised. The old traditions of hand-work are no longer of use. New methods demand a new spirit of design to animate the products of manufacture with beauty.
Beauty indeed has dropped into neglect in the hurrying times that came upon us. Linen and cotton and woollen goods, and cast iron, and all like products, have been made in such increased quantities, and at such decreased prices, that the markets of the world have been widened, and the manufactories of the world have been kept busy to supply the demand of new strata of society for the simple commodities which previously they did without. A rapid increase of population has co-operated with these other conditions towards the same result.
But now the supply of the simple necessaries has overtaken the demand. Enough of them is produced to satisfy the needs of that part of humanity capable of purchasing. An insane race of competition at underselling one another has come to pass between different countries. Profits have thus been reduced in many trades almost to vanishing point. Competition is now trying to get itself done away with amongst the producers of raw materials, and eventually, no doubt, great 'Combines' will cause it to cease. But the cessation of competition will not come to the manufacturers of more complicated goods. Of two things capable of being beautiful as well as useful, an intelligent public will always buy the prettier, all Combines notwithstanding. Hence competition itself will make the manufacturer pay increasing attention to design. In some trades, notably in that of pottery, the fact has long been apparent. It will become increasingly so in many more. A pretty object always commands a market. The houses of this country are not so full that there is not room in them for pretty things. The world may be supplied with all the yards of plain linen or cotton that it wants or can use, and yet a pretty patterned stuff will still find some one to want it for its own sake, and to invent a use for it previously unthought of.
Henceforward, therefore, time and the self-interest of manufacturers work for, instead of against, the lover of Art. His hobby, if so you please to call it, has become an important factor in the future of our national prosperity. Artists and manufacturers are being brought together by the progress of events. It is time that they met together and considered their mutual interests. Such a meeting will for the first time take place at Liverpool on December 3d and the following days. It is to be hoped that this will be the first of a series of such annual congresses; and if the second were to be held at Glasgow in 1889, the future of our movement might be regarded as secured.
THE ACTION OF LIGHT ON WATER-COLOURS.
i.
CONSIDERABLE attention has of late years been directed to the fading of water-colour drawings, and this has consequently given rise to searching investigations being made as to the causes thereof.
In April 1886, Dr. W. J. Russell, F.R.S., and Captain Abney, F.R.S., were requested by the Lords of the Committee of Council on Education to carry out an exhaustive series of experiments on the action of light on water-colour drawings. Subsequently, at the request of the Royal Society of Painters in Water-Colours, a representative committee of artists was appointed with wliom those gentlemen were invited to confer upon the subject.
As these gentlemen state in the introduction of their first report, which has been issued in the form of a blue-book, an investigation of the causes of the fading of colours naturally divides itself into at least three parts—first, the nature of the optical changes; second, the nature of the chemical changes; and third, the causes which initiate and accelerate these changes. To carry out such an
