mprovement will be reached under
the traditional forms of the letters. It will next be the task of
science to show by what modifications or substitutions the poorest
letters, such as s z e a x o can be brought up to the visibility of the
best letters, such as m w d j l p. Some of these changes may be slight,
such as shortening the overhang of the a and slanting the bar of the e,
while others may involve forms that are practically new. It is worth
remembering at this point that while our capital letters are strictly
Roman, our small or lowercase letters came into being during the middle
ages, and many of them would not be recognized by an ancient Roman as
having any relation to his alphabet. They therefore belong to the modern
world and can be altered without sacrilege.

There will remain other problems to be solved, such as the use of
capitals at all; punctuation, whether to keep our present practice or to
devise a better; the use of spacing between paragraphs, words, and even
letters; besides numerous problems now hardly guessed. Many of the
conclusions of science will be openly challenged, but such opposition is
easiest to overcome. Harder to meet will be the opposition of prejudice,
one of whose favorite weapons is always ridicule. But the results of
science in the field of printing, as in every other, are sure to make
their way into practice, and here their beneficent effect in the relief
of eye strain and its consequent nervous wear and in the saving of time
is beyond our present power to calculate or even imagine. The world at
the end of the twentieth century will be a different world from this, a
far better world, we trust; and one of the potent influences in bringing
about that improvement will then be traced, we are confident, to the
fact that, near the beginning of the century, science was called in to
solve those problems of the book that belong to the laboratory rather
than to the printing office.

TYPES AND EYES: THE PROBLEM

Our modern world submits with an ill grace to the nuisance of
spectacles, but flatters itself that after all they afford a measure of
civilization. Thirty-five years ago Dr. Emile Javal, a Parisian oculist,
contested this self-complacent inference, believing the terrible
increase of near sight among school children to be due rather to a
defect than to an excess of civilization. He conceived that the trouble
must lie in the material set for the eye to work upon, namely, the
p