Whoever introduced the practice of vignetting was no artist, and the "dodge" was evolved from a misconception of the aims of art, or for commercial purposes. Its origin is obvious, the idea was taken from one of the incomplete methods of artistic expression, such as chalk drawing. In such methods the artist has a perfect right to leave the background untinted, or only to shade round the head so as to give it relief, but with a perfect technique like photography, vignetting is useless, nay inartistic and false, as it destroys all tonality. We get by this method a softly delicately lighted head, against a sparkling background, the two are incompatible, and not only that, but the photographer who vignettes is deliberately throwing away a most effective aid to perfect impression, namely, the relief effected by the reflected light from his background, and when you add to this the conventional shape of the vignetted head and shadows, the result is feeble in the extreme. Here, then, is another false god which has for years held sway. We ask the student, did he ever see a vignette painted by Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Holbein, Velasquez, Gainsborough, or Frank Hals? Such men knew too well the value of a background to throw it away; they could not have painted a vignetted head. Look at their chalk drawings, and the case is very different; there they were dealing with an incomplete method, and kept rigidly within their bounds. In our early photographic days, we learned printing from an industrial photographer, who did an extensive business in vignetted heads, and it was a source of great amusement to us to watch the mechanical application of the vignettes by the "head" printer. This is of course another source of the mechanical appearance of ordinary photographs; for by vignetting fifty different heads a certain uniformity must result, as in a regiment dressed in uniform, with of course the fatal result, the loss of all individuality, character, and of course art. The few photographic portraits that we have seen worth studying were certainly not vignetted. Mrs. Cameron did not vignette, she knew better. That people demand vignettes and pay for them is nothing to us, let photographers sell them as they do scraps and chromographs, and other fancy articles, if it please the childish and vulgar, but let them not be called works of art, for on the contrary they are certain indices of bad taste. Vignetting might be admissible in certain decorative cases in book illustration, as when a landscape decorates an initial letter, but in pictures for framing, never.