work--not perhaps to be called intelligent as yet, but forming, nascent, feeling its way into conscious and active life--make up a group of most favorable circumstances for a real artistic development. Whether such a development will take place depends in large measure on the clearness with which engravers understand the laws of their art, as presented by their materials, and on the degree in which such knowledge controls them. The experiments of recent years are to be judged finally by the results; but, in spite of the novel effects obtained, and of the new character that has been given to the art, there is at present no such unanimity, either among the engravers or the public, as to be decisive of the worth of the new work as a whole. While the issue is still doubtful, and the stake is the future of the only art by which those who care for the growth of civilization can develop in the people a sense of art, bring them to an appreciation of its value, open their understandings to its teachings, and fill their lives with its delights, something may be gained by recurring to fundamental principles, as illustrated by the practice of the older masters, not with an end to limit the future by the past, but to foresee it. Such a brief review and summary of past thought respecting the aims and methods of wood-engraving, with such corrections as modern improvements in processes justify, will afford the surest ground for criticism of the work still to be considered. All the graphic arts have to do with some one or more of the three modes under which nature is revealed to the artist--the mode of pure form, the mode of pure color, the mode of form and color, as they are affected by the different lights and shadows in which they exist. In nature these three modes do not exist separately, and usually no one of them is so prominent as to efface the others; in the several arts, however, the principal attention is given, now to one, now to another, of them, according to the capacities of the art and the powers of the artists. Thus sculpture deals only with form, and even in painting, which includes all within its province, different masters make a choice, and aim principally at reproducing color, or chiaroscuro, or form, as their talents direct them, for a genius seldom arises with the power to combine all these with the truth and harmony of nature. Wood-engraving, there is no need to say, cannot reproduce the real hues of objects, nor the play of light upon hue and form, nor the more marvellously transforming touch of shadow; it can represent the form of a peach, but it cannot paint its delicate tints, nor adequately and accurately show how the beauty of its bloom in sun differs from the beauty of its bloom in shade. More broadly, a landscape shot with the evanescent shadows that hover in rapidly moving mists, or the intermingling light and gloom of a wind-swept moonlit sky half overcast with clouds, wood-engraving has no power to mirror in true likeness.