trong magnifier,
and you could identify their owners, if you met them in a court of law.

Many persons suppose that they are looking on _miniatures_ of the
objects represented, when they see them in the stereoscope. They will be
surprised to be told that they see most objects as large as they appear
in Nature. A few simple experiments will show how what we see in
ordinary vision is modified in our perceptions by what we think we see.
We made a sham stereoscope, the other day, with no glasses, and an
opening in the place where the pictures belong, about the size of one of
the common stereoscopic pictures. Through this we got a very ample view
of the town of Cambridge, including Mount Auburn and the Colleges, in a
single field of vision. We do not recognize how minute distant objects
really look to us, without something to bring the fact home to our
conceptions. A man does not deceive us as to his real size when we see
him at the distance of the length of Cambridge Bridge. But hold a common
black pin before the eyes at the distance of distinct vision, and
one-twentieth of its length, nearest the point, is enough to cover him
so that he cannot be seen. The head of the same pin will cover one of
the Cambridge horse-cars at the same distance, and conceal the tower of
Mount Auburn, as seen from Boston.

We are near enough to an edifice to see it well, when we can easily
read an inscription upon it. The stereoscopic views of the arches
of Constantine and of Titus give not only every letter of the old
inscriptions, but render the grain of the stone itself. On the pediment
of the Pantheon may be read, not only the words traced by Agrippa, but a
rough inscription above it, scratched or hacked into the stone by some
wanton hand during an insurrectionary tumult.

This distinctness of the lesser details of a building or a landscape
often gives us incidental truths which interest us more than the central
object of the picture. Here is Alloway Kirk, in the churchyard of which
you may read a real story by the side of the ruin that tells of more
romantic fiction. There stands the stone "Erected by James Russell,
seedsman, Ayr, in memory of his children,"--three little boys, James,
and Thomas, and John, all snatched away from him in the space of three
successive summer-days, and lying under the matted grass in the shadow
of the old witch-haunted walls. It was Burns's Alloway Kirk we paid
for, and we find we have bought a share in the g