A greater photographic achievement, however, than the picturing of the social and historic events was the marvelous success of the kinematograph with the life of nature.  No explorer in recent years has crossed distant lands and seas without a kinematographic outfit.  We suddenly looked into the most intimate life of the African wilderness.  There the elephants and giraffes and monkeys passed to the waterhole, not knowing that the moving picture man was turning his crank in the top of a tree.  We followed Scott and Shackleton into the regions of eternal ice, we climbed the Himalayas, we saw the world from the height of the aeroplane, and every child in Europe knows now the wonders of Niagara.  But the kinematographer has not sought nature only where it is gigantic or strange; he follows its path with no less admirable effect when it is idyllic.  The brook in the woods, the birds in their nest, the flowers trembling in the wind have brought their charm to the delighted eye more and more with the progress of the new art.

But the wonders of nature which the camera unveils to us are not limited to those which the naked eye can follow.  The technical progress led to the attachment of the microscope.  After overcoming tremendous difficulties, the scientists succeeded in developing a microscope kinematography which multiplies the dimensions a hundred thousand times.  We may see on the screen the fight of the bacteria with the microscopically small blood corpuscles in the blood stream of a diseased animal.  Yes, by the miracles of the camera we may trace the life of nature even in forms which no human observation really finds in the outer world.  Out there it may take weeks for the orchid to bud and blossom and fade; in the picture the process passes before us in a few seconds.  We see how the caterpillar spins its cocoon and how it breaks it and how the butterfly unfolds its wings; and all which needed days and months goes on in a fraction of a minute.  New interest for geography and botany and zooelogy has thus been aroused by these developments, undreamed of in the early days of the kinematograph, and the scientists themselves have through this new means of technique gained unexpected help for their labors.

The last achievement in this universe of photoknowledge is “the magazine on the screen.”  It is a bold step which yet seemed necessary in our day of rapid kinematoscopic progress.  The popular printed magazines in America had their heydey in the muckraking period about ten years ago.  Their hold on the imagination of the public which wants to be informed and entertained at the same time has steadily decreased, while the power of the moving picture houses has increased.  The picture house ought therefore to take up the task of the magazines which it has partly displaced.  The magazines give only a small place to the news of the day, a larger place to articles in which scholars and men of public life discuss significant problems.  Much American history in the last two