Then there are endowments already in existence that will no doubt be diverted to the photoplay channel.  In every state house, and in Washington, D.C., increasing quantities of dead printed matter have been turned out year after year.  They have served to kindle various furnaces and feed the paper-mills a second time.  Many of these routine reports will remain in innocuous desuetude.  But one-fourth of them, perhaps, are capable of being embodied in films.  If they are scientific demonstrations, they can be made into realistic motion picture records.  If they are exhortations, they can be transformed into plays with a moral, brothers of the film Your Girl and Mine.  The appropriations for public printing should include such work hereafter.

The scientific museums distribute routine pamphlets that would set the whole world right on certain points if they were but read by said world.  Let them be filmed and started.  Whatever the congressman is permitted to frank to his constituency, let him send in the motion picture form when it is the expedient and expressive way.

When men work for the high degrees in the universities, they labor on a piece of literary conspiracy called a thesis which no one outside the university hears of again.  The gist of this research work that is dead to the democracy, through the university merits of thoroughness, moderation of statement, and final touch of discovery, would have a chance to live and grip the people in a motion picture transcript, if not a photoplay.  It would be University Extension.  The relentless fire of criticism which the heads of the departments would pour on the production before they allowed it to pass would result in a standardization of the sense of scientific fact over the land.  Suppose the film has the coat of arms of the University of Chicago along with the name of the young graduate whose thesis it is.  He would have a chance to reflect credit on the university even as much as a foot-ball player.

Large undertakings might be under way, like those described in the chapter on Architecture-in-Motion.  But these would require much more than the ordinary outlay for thesis work, less, perhaps, than is taken for Athletics.  Lyman Howe and several other world-explorers have already set the pace in the more human side of the educative film.  The list of Mr. Howe’s offerings from the first would reveal many a one that would have run the gantlet of a university department.  He points out a new direction for old energies, whereby professors may become citizens.

Let the cave-man, reader of picture-writing, be allowed to ponder over scientific truth.  He is at present the victim of the alleged truth of the specious and sentimental variety of photograph.  It gives the precise edges of the coat or collar of the smirking masher and the exact fibre in the dress of the jumping-jack.  The eye grows weary of sharp points and hard edges that mean nothing.  All this idiotic precision is going to waste.  It should be enlisted in the cause of science and abated everywhere else.  The edges in art are as mysterious as in science they are exact.