As a psychical phenomenon, natural to so pure an atmosphere, there have developed in Mexico those faculties, which require perfect eyesight. Mexican photographs have attracted notice in New York, and Mora conducts, in competition with the best photographers of that metropolis, a profitable business, being quite in vogue with the American aristocracy. The photographic views of the central plateau are distinguished by the sharpness of their outlines, shadows and details and are exported to Europe and the United States, constituting, in those regions, of less clear vision, an irrefutable proof of the perfection of our landscapes transferred to their canvases by Velasco and other painters of scenery; when he desired to exhibit his paintings of the Valley, in the exposition of 1889, he found opposition on the part of Meissonier, who believed it impossible that there should be such sharp and vivid detail and coloring in a real landscape. Proofs of a different order, and entirely practical, of the sharpness of outline, are given by our professional hunters, who with a miserable musket, sally from their pueblos in the morning in search of game and invariably return with two animals. In the battalions, good shots form seventy-five per cent of the troop, with certainty of aim at five hundred to a thousand metres distance. The wild Indians of Coahuila, Chihuahua, and Nuevo Leon, shoot their arrows at a five-cent piece thrown into the air; and boys on the streets and in the villages strike the bulls-eye with their sling-stones at a distance only limited by their strength. In billiards and bowling, in the suburbs, with badly rounded balls and illy-leveled tables, they make shots as brilliant as if both balls and tables were all they should be. The arts of drawing have developed as rapidly as the political and economical conditions permitted; and in all America, Mexico has been the only country which has produced a school, so numerous, distinguished, and original have been her painters. Their works have almost been exhausted, by exportation to Europe as paintings of Spanish artists of the great Seventeenth Century, but students still come, from the republics to the south, sent to here study the masterpieces which we still retain, since the number of the national painters, of whom some work of merit remains, rises to one hundred and sixty-one. The art they practised was catholic and aristocratic, religious subjects and portraits; consequently it decayed with the colonial regime and fell with the decline of power of the clergy; but, in the lack of demand for such art, the national æsthetic spirit took refuge in popular modeling in clay, rags, or wax, and produced in the figurines of Guadalajara and Puebla an artistic school, only inferior in product and spontaneity to that of Tanagra in ancient Greece.