The 14th of February is a red-letter day in the history of antiques and antiqueing; for the exhaustive researches and diligent labors of the members of the Academy have not only awakened untold numbers of people to the refining value of something really old, but have cleared up those highly important moot points; that is, when does a thing cease to be merely old and become an antique; and when is an antique not an antique? One of the finest contributions to the literature of antiques, for example, was Dr. Pry’s masterly monograph on _Chisel Markings and Screw-Driver Scratches of the Lower Connecticut Valley_ (Bulletin of the American Academy for the Popularization of Antiquities, Vol. IV, No. 7, pp. 3682 _et seq._). In this monograph Dr. Pry pointed out that an old Colonial frying-pan was a genuine antique, worthy of being used as the central object in a modern mantel-ornament grouping. The workmanship, the artistry, the incomparable grace of a genuine De Ruyter frying-pan puts it in the same class with a great painting or a great ruin. A De Ruyter frying-pan in first-class shape is, in fact, infinitely preferable to some great ruins, especially if the ruins come under the head of third-class ruins.† On the other hand, a genuine Oppendink frying-pan, carefully made during the same year that, say, the De Ruyter frying-pan was produced, is worthless as an antique. Both are antiques, yet one is not an antique. There are some who persist in buying Oppendink frying-pans and hanging them on the walls of their living-rooms, alongside a beautiful old Colonial hack-saw and a rare Colonial egg-beater; but their numbers, thanks to the magnificent, careful, and far-reaching work of the American Academy for the Popularization of Antiquities, are gradually becoming fewer. ———— † Grasswink, H. Q., _Ruins: Brick, Stone, and Human; Their Classification and Idiosyncrasies_.