In reading and re-reading Emerson's _Journals_ one is impressed with their remarkable quotability, and in this mechanical handiness of his work we have a partial explanation of the slowness with which it has been assimilated. "Boulders" are fated to be knocked about before they are appreciated. We throw them at one another with a sort of physical dexterity until, burnished and transformed, they are recognized as adapted to higher uses. We do not flippantly quote or mention the authors who have become personal to us; I quote Emerson's _Journal_ as a blessed soliloquy. D. C. W. New York Letter GEORGE SOULE The most interesting hours of the last week I have spent in listening to discussions of the futurists. Someone told of a superb incident recently reported of a speech by Marinetti, the enunciator of the futurist philosophy. Marinetti, after denouncing the past in his usual method, proceeded to eliminate women from his world. "But," said someone, "how will you continue the human race?" "We will _not_ continue the human race," rejoined Marinetti, with superb _éclat_. Daring and magnificent utterance! But, after all, perhaps he is the only sane one, and the norm of human intelligence quite insane. That fits in well with the recently reported discovery of a Paris scientist, that all variations in the course of evolution are the result of disease, and that there would have been no man had not some ape had a parasite in his thyroid gland. All of which goes to show that I was right in my statement (which Chesterton probably has said before me) that all logical extremes are illogical, since the world is based on an eternal paradox. Really it is quite simple to follow the futurist line of thought once you get the hang of it. For instance--two developments of painting predicted at the Troubetzkoys. In the first, each plane in the cubist picture, instead of being colored, is to be numbered, and the numbers printed in a catalogue opposite the names of the colors for which they stand. Thus any approach to the vulgar intrusion of realism would be avoided, and abstract beauty furthered. What chances for the imagination! And think of the subtle possibilities in the mathematics of color! One could surely express by some abstruse quadratic a color quite beyond the realm of visual possibility, and thus man by one gigantic tug at his bootstraps would pull his soul out of its finite limitations.