PROJECTIVE ORNAMENT

Teachers of design might put the problem of such conventionalizations before their pupils to their advantage, and to the advancement of art. There is, however, one difficulty that presents itself. By reason of scientific agriculture, intensive cultivation under glass, and because of the ease and freedom of present-day transportation, vegetation in civilized countries has lost much of its local character and significance. Corn, buckwheat, cotton, tobacco, though native to America, are less distinctively American than they once were. Moreover, dwellers in cities, where for the most part the giant flora of architecture lifts its skyscraping heads, know nothing of buckwheat except in pancakes, of cotton except as cloth or in the bale. Corn in the can is more familiar to them than corn on the cob, and not one smoker in ten would recognize tobacco as it grows in the fields. Our divorce from nature has become so complete that we no longer dwell in the old-time intimate communion with her visible forms.