The literature upon this general subject, such as it is, is concerned largely with its relations with school hygiene.  We are bound to give our children a fair start in life, in conditions of vision as well as in other respects, even if we are careless about ourselves.  The topic of “Conservation of Vision,” in which, however, type-size played but a small part, was given special attention at the Fourth International Congress of School Hygiene, held in Buffalo in 1913.  Investigations on the subject, so far as they affect the child in school, are well summed up in the last chapter of Huey’s “Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading.”  In general, the consensus of opinion of investigators seems to be that the most legible type is that between eleven-point and fourteen-point.  Opinion regarding space between lines, due to “leading,” is not quite so harmonious.  Some authorities think that it is better to increase the size of the letters; and Huey asserts that an attempt to improve unduly small type by making wide spaces between lines is a mistake.

As to the relative legibility of different type-faces, one of the most exhaustive investigations was that made at Clark University by Miss Barbara E. Roethlin, whose results were published in 1912.  This study considers questions of form, style, and grouping, independently of mere size; and the conclusion is that legibility is a product of six factors, of which size is one, the others being form, heaviness of face, width of the margin around the letter, position in the letter-group, and shape and size of adjoining letters.  For “tired eyes” the size factor would appear of overwhelming importance except where the other elements make the page fantastically illegible.  In Miss Roethlin’s tables, based upon a combination of the factors mentioned above, the maximum of legibility almost always coincides with that of size.  These experiments seem to have influenced printers, whose organization in Boston has appointed a committee to urge upon the Carnegie Institution the establishment of a department of research to make scientific tests of printing-types in regard to the comparative legibility and the possibility of improving some of their forms.  Their effort, so far, has met with no success; but the funds at the disposal of this body could surely be put to no better use.

With regard to the improvement of legibility by alteration of form, it has been recognized by experiments from the outset that the letters of our alphabet, especially the small, or “lower-case” letters, are not equally legible.  Many proposals for modifying or changing them have been made, some of them odd or repugnant.  It has been suggested, for instance, that the Greek lambda be substituted for our l, which in its present form is easily confused with the dotted i.  Other pairs of letters (u and n, o and e, for example) are differentiated with difficulty.  The privilege of modifying alphabetic form is one that has been frequently