“Heaven bless you, young man, there aren’t any rules! Go ahead and write when you have something to say, not when you think you ought to say something. I’ll edit out the nonsense. And, by the way, unless there happens to have been born into your noddle a little bit of the native aptitude, you ought to go and be a lawyer or a farmer or a banker or a great statesman.” Mr. Dana had no regard for typographical gymnastics. To him a head-line was something to fill the mind rather than the eye. He knew the utter impossibility of trying to startle the reader eight times in as many adjacent columns--a feat which Mr. Bennett and some of his imitators seemed to consider feasible. Surprise is not the only emotion upon which a newspaper can play. The _Sun_ stretched all the human octaves from horror to amusement, but the keys of horror were only touched when it was necessary. Make rules for news? How is it possible to make a rule for something the value of which lies in the fact that it is the narrative of what never had happened, in exactly the same way, before? John Bogart, a city editor of the _Sun_ who absorbed the Dana idea of news and the handling thereof, once said to a young reporter: “When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.” The _Sun_ always waited for the man to bite the dog. Here is Mr. Dana’s own definition of news: The first thing which an editor must look for is news. If the newspaper has not the news it may have everything else, yet it will be comparatively unsuccessful; and by news I mean everything that occurs, everything which is of human interest, and which is of sufficient interest to arrest and absorb the attention of the public or of any considerable part of it. There is a great disposition in some quarters to say that the newspapers ought to limit the amount of news that they print; that certain kinds of news ought not to be published. I do not know how that is. I am not prepared to maintain any abstract proposition in that line; but I have always felt that whatever the divine Providence permitted to occur I was not too proud to report. A belief has been accepted in some quarters that the _Sun_ of Dana’s time preferred college men for its staff. This was in a way false, but it is true that a great many of the _Sun’s_ young men came from the colleges. Mr. Dana’s views on the matter of educational equipment were quite plainly expressed by himself: