Excerpt from The Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh: Prize Essay Contest, 1899<br><br>Genius, Hazlitt says, is some strong quality in the mind, aiming at and bringing out some new and striking quality in nature. It is this strong, original quality in the mind which these competitions aim to stimulate; it is this that the new education with its improved methods professes to develop; it is this that we hope these boys and girls, who are heirs of that wonderful century, the twentieth, will attain.<br><br>In the interests of that larger and richer education, which: this Carnegie Institute seeks to promote, may I on my own personal responsibility, express the hope that the Director of the Art Gallery will offer prizes to the more advanced pupils in our schools for the best essays on some one or more pictures in the collection. It seems to me that such a competition would admirably complement the excellent work now being done bv the Museum.<br><br>Science emphasizes the anatomy of the world; Art its won der, bloom and beauty. The former is apt to follow the guid ance of reason alone and confine its attention too closely to things; the latter sometimes takes the wings of imagination and ignores the most obvious facts. Each needs the help of the other. Science at its best is thought winging its way from the known to the unknown, and Art achieves her most notable triumphs when she shows a supernal glory shining in the limita tions of actual forms.<br><br>If Pittsburgh is to be an Art centre, it must have an artistic atmosphere. What more promising means of generating such an atmosphere than by inducing some hundred or more pupils every year to make a sympathetic study of these pictures, thus. Creating a necessity for the introduction into our schools of the study of Art, which I believe, can do more for the refinement and enrichment of our youth than anything now taught in our courses of study. (loud applause.)<br><br>About the Publisher<br><br>Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com<br><br>This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.