rinted page. He therefore instituted a series of experiments to
discover its defects from the point of view of hygiene. Being an
oculist, he naturally adopted the test of distance to determine the
legibility of single letters at the limit of vision, and he employed the
oculist's special type. His conclusions cover a wide range. He decided
that paper with a slightly buff tint printed with an ink tinged with
blue was the most agreeable combination for the eye, though in absolute
clearness nothing can surpass the contrast of black upon white. He held
that leading is no advantage to clearness, and that it would be better
to print the same words on the page in a larger type unleaded. He found
the current type too condensed; this is particularly a fault of French
type. But he favored spacing between the letters of a word, a conclusion
in which he has not been followed by later investigators. He found
shaded type a disadvantage and advocated a fairly black type in which
all the lines are of uniform thickness. But most interesting are his
conclusions regarding the letters themselves. He found that the eye in
reading follows a horizontal line which cuts the words just below the
tops of the short letters, the parts of the letters being indistinct in
proportion as they are distant from this line. It is chiefly by their
individuality on this line that letters acquire distinctness. But just
here he found that an unfortunate tendency towards uniformity had been
at work, flattening the rounded letters and rounding the square letters.
In a series of articles he gives exhaustive studies of the various
letters, their characteristics, and their possible reform.

[Illustration: These ten-point lines in Della Robbia of the American
Type Founders Company include the principal elements of reform advocated
by Dr. Javal, as well as others mentioned below]

A few years later Dr. Cattell, now a professor in Columbia, but then an
investigator in Wundt's psychological laboratory in Leipsic, made a
series of studies on brain and eye inertia in the recognition of
letters. Like Dr. Javal he found some alphabets harder to see than
others and the letters of the same alphabet different in legibility. He
saw no advantage in having a mixture of capital and small letters. He
condemned shading in types and opposed all ornament as an element of
confusion. He regarded punctuation marks as hard to see and proposed
that they should be displaced, or at least supp