The fine arts of 1943 have kept pace with other branches of culture. Sculpture and painting, instead of having been thrown into the shade by the wonderful achievements in photography and engraving, have received a great impetus. Leading citizens vie with each other in purchasing (sometimes even in making) statues to adorn their own homes and gardens, and public streets and parks. In the same way painting is taught as a science as well as an art; to be a fair painter being more common than to be a fair performer upon the instrument once known as “pianoforte.” The pipe organ has become the national musical instrument, and its glorious tones are heard from houses of far less than palatial pretensions. The public buildings of this country, no longer laughing-stocks for foreigners, are at once spacious, beautiful, substantial and convenient. In them the new American style of architecture, in which proportions are of more value than arrangement, finds fitting types on every hand. In every town of any magnitude or importance, are free museums of science and art, visits to which are as common as to the beautiful parks laid out as breathing places in the larger cities. Color-masters vie with each other in great kaleidoscopic exhibitions, which out-rival in beauty of rapid combinations and successions of color, the most brilliant pyrotechnic displays of the generations past. The art of perfumery has been carried to a point never even dreamed of by those of the preceding century. The law steps in and prevents any one from using, or permitting the use of, any odor (like musk) which is prejudicial to health or general comfort. The gamut of odor has been discovered, and harmonies of perfumes are made just like those of colors, or of musical tones. Concerts are given at which, the great perfume-masters of the day produce chords and pleasing successions of odors, which draw great crowds of the most refined, fully appreciative of the delights there offered. Flower-culture is a national pastime. Where there are no large gardens, small patches are devoted to floriculture; and in the most crowded city, window-boxes hold the latest new hybrid plants and make the most frequented thoroughfares a garden of beauty. Dwarfing and aggrandizing plants, by electric currents passed around their roots, has been practiced for twenty years upon a large scale; so that in the great conservatories, one may find tiny plants grown from the cones of the Yosemite great trees, and may also see what have sprung from tiny fungi but are now as large as the old-fashioned cabbages of the days of President Harrison. The dyeing of plants and of their flowers by substances introduced in solution at their roots, is a fine art most successful and pleasing in its application.