The history of wood-engraving in America, until recent years, is comparatively insignificant. In art, as in literature, the first generation of the Republic followed the English tradition almost slavishly; the engravers, indeed, showed hardly any individuality, and left no work of permanent value. During Colonial times some very rude apprentice-work on metal had been produced; but the first certain engraving in wood bears date of 1794, and was from the hand of Dr. Alexander Anderson (1775-1870), a physician by profession, but with a natural bent toward the art, which he had played at from boyhood, and finally made the principal business of his life. The sight of some of Bewick’s early work had determined him to employ wood as a material in place of the type-metal on which he had previously engraved in relief, and the example of Bewick taught him to use white line. At that time, and for many years afterward, the art was applied mainly to the production of cuts for advertisements, labels, and the like, as a servant of trade; its use for illustration simply was confined almost wholly to juvenile books. The engravers who at the beginning of the century introduced the art in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New Haven were few, and, for the most part, self-taught; usually they merely copied English cuts, and thus they reflected in their poorer work the manner of successive English schools; but at least they kept the art alive, and handed it on through their pupils. Dr. Anderson was the best of them; yet, although he was free and bold in his handling of white line, and once or twice attained an excellence that proved him a worthy pupil of Bewick, he left nothing of enduring interest, and the work of his fellows met with even swifter forgetfulness. Woodcuts of really high value were not produced in America until Joseph Alexander Adams (b. 1803), one of the young engravers encouraged by Dr. Anderson, began to do his best work (Figs. 75, 76), about 1834, and applied his talents to the illustration of the Bible, published by the Harper Brothers in 1843, with which wood-engraving may be properly said to have begun its great career in this country. This volume was embellished by sixteen hundred cuts, executed under the supervision of Mr. Adams, and plainly exhibits the capacities and limitations of the art at that time. Other illustrated books followed this from the same press, and from that of the Putnams; the cuts in the papers and magazines, established during the second quarter of the century, became more numerous, and the attention paid by the American Tract Society to the engravings in its various publications had great influence in encouraging and improving the art. The work of this first half-century, however, as a whole, does not deserve any great praise; in judging it, the inexperience of the engravers and the difficulties of printing must be remembered; but in its inferior portions it is marked by feebleness and coarseness, and in