It has been rashly assumed by some writers that the Japanese do not study from nature. All their work is an emphatic protest against this supposition. It can in fact be shown conclusively that the Japanese have derived all their fundamental ideas of symmetry, so different from ours, from a close study of nature and her processes in the attainment of endless variety. A special feature of their art is that, while often closely and minutely imitating natural objects, such as birds, flowers and fishes, the especial objects of their predilection and study, they frequently combine the facts of external nature with a conventional mode of treatment better suited to their purpose. During the long apprenticeship that educated Japanese serve to acquire the power of writing with the brush the complicated characters borrowed from Chinese, they unconsciously cultivate the habit of minute observation and the power of accurate imitation, and with these the delicacy of touch and freedom of hand which only long practice can give. A hair's-breadth deviation in a line is fatal to good calligraphy, both among the Chinese and the Japanese. When they come to use the pencil in drawing, they already possess accuracy of eye and free command of the brush. Whether a Japanese art-worker sets himself to copy what he sees before him or to give play to his fancy in combining what he has seen with some ideal in his mind, the result shows perfect facility of execution and easy grace in all the lines. The beauties of the human form never appealed to the Japanese artist. Associating the nude solely with the performance of menial tasks, he deemed it worse than a solecism to transfer such subjects to his canvas, and thus a wide field of motive was closed to him. On the other hand, the draped figure received admirable treatment from his brush, and the naturalistic school of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries reached a high level of skill in depicting men, women and children in motion. Nor has there ever been a Japanese Landseer. Sosen's monkeys and badgers constitute the one possible exception, but the horses, oxen, deer, tigers, dogs, bears, foxes and even cats of the best Japanese artists were ill drawn and badly modelled. In the field of landscape the Japanese painter fully reached the eminence on which his great Chinese masters stood. He did not obey the laws of linear perspective as they are formulated in the Occident, nor did he show cast shadows, but his aerial perspective and his foreshortening left nothing to be desired. It has been suggested that he deliberately eschewed chiaroscuro because his pictures, destined invariably to hang in an alcove, were required to be equally effective from every aspect and had also to form part of a decorative scheme. But the more credible explanation is that he merely followed Chinese example in this matter, as he did also in linear perspective, accepting without question the curious canon that lines