Page:The Newspaper and the Historian.djvu/544

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and the widening of the circle of interest from the individual to the community , while the individual becomes concrete. Illustra tions of games and of athletic contests are now from photographs

that show the whole event, both players and spectators ; individ ual athletes are shown rather than drawings of any man running,

or playing ball, or with wings on his feet ; the symbolic and the conventional has changed to the specific and the individual illustration , while the individual is shown in relation to a larger

whole. A single periodical like Life showswithin the range of a few years the decline in the use of fabulous and prehistoric animals and the use made of representations of the devil.10 The illustration in its own character shows the cleavage between those to whom an appeal is made by the crude humor of

the comic supplement and the sporting page and those attracted

by artistic effects both of process and of scene. Thus the illustra tion shows the change in fashions of humor as unerringly as it records the changes of fashion in material things.

The illustration reflects the prevailing interest in all questions

of sanitation and of public health. It shows the plans and the interior arrangement of hospitals, the uniform of surgeons, physicians and trained nurses,and it spreads far and wide specific

knowledge of sanitary conditions. The illustration serves the investigator in disclosing the con ditions of tenement house lifewhere piecework is done, in showing the peculiar features of casual occupations, like those of berry

picking and the canning industries , in making known the effects of overwork , of child labor, and of occupationaldiseases. The illustration may also serve the cause of justice through enabling the officers of the law to detect and to identify those

who have violated the law . The snapshotmay have great value

in the courts. Often it is so clear that no person could prove an 9 Suggested by A . Rogers.

10 Early magazines show initial and marginal decorations of dragons, sea serpents, griffins, and various grotesque animals . Life in 1901 shows a mermaid as a collector of water rents, the submarine is an octopus, the

devil tortures thebeef trust ,while later the trusts are represented as a dragon about to devour liberty . In 1905 the devil in Hades caricatures modern society ; by 1909 the fabulous animals disappear and the humorous devil appears ; in 1915 the devil is apparently first represented in the character

of a particular person . - Suggested by M . K . Brown .