chase
of a diamond because it would perspire in the presence of poisons, the
prospective customer would leave him in disgust, but the same statement
in a daily paper, endorsed by the name of some wise (?) man of an
unwise age centuries back, would not be without influence. Print has
been so clothed with authority that, yellow journalism notwithstanding,
the public still fail to recognize a lie in that garb.
Although
the wide diffusion of the knowledge of facts now, will not permit the
old time recklessness of misstatement in one direction, it has opened a
new opportunity and another form of credulity, of which sensational
writers are taking advantage. The wonderful developments of science of
late have prepared the public mind to believe any wild statement if
given as a scientific fact. Let a scientist state that radium affects
the color of precious stones, and in a few weeks, magazines, trade
journals, and the daily papers, teem with articles describing in detail
the process by which rubies, sapphires, emeralds, topaz, can, by
association with radium, be made out of ordinary corundum. In a month
they have changed the simple transformation of a few colors, into the
transmutation at will of minerals, for many elements of which some of
these stones are formed do not exist in corundum. So also if one
announces that he can make diamond out of something other than the one
thing (carbon) which a diamond is, the absurdity is hawked from San
Francisco to St. Petersburg; chiefly between the first place and New
York.
The
literature of advertising is sufficiently extensive and important to be
worthy of notice. The character of it in the Middle Ages was in
accordance with the age.
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