again for the iconic qualities of touch and sense interplay (synes-thesia, as it was called) in poetry, as in painting. The German sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand inspired Berenson's remark that "the painter can accomplish his task only by giving tactile values to retinal impressions." Such a program involves the endowing of each plastic form with a kind of nervous system of its own. The electric form of pervasive impression is profoundly tactile and organic, endowing each object with a kind of unified sensibility, as the cave painting had done. The unconscious task of the painter in the new electric age was to raise this fact to the level of conscious awareness. From this time on, the mere specialist in any field was doomed to the sterility and inanity that echoed an archaic form of the departing mechanical age. Contemporary awareness had to become integral and inclusive again, after centuries of dissociated sensibilities. The Bauhaus school became one of the great centers of effort tending toward an inclusive human awareness; but the same task was accepted by a race of giants that sprang up in music and poetry, architecture, and painting. They gave the arts of this century an ascendancy over those of other ages comparable to that which we have long recognized as true of modern science. During its early growth, the telegraph was subordinate to railway and newspaper, those immediate extensions of industrial production and marketing. In fact, once the railways began to stretch across the continent, they relied very much on the telegraph for their coordination, so that the image of the station-master and the telegraph operator were easily superimposed in the American mind. It was in 1844 that Samuel Morse opened a telegraph line from Washington to Baltimore with $30,000 obtained from Congress. Private enterprise, as usual, waited for bureaucracy to clarify the image and goals of the new operation. Once it proved profitable, the fury of private promotion and initiative became impressive, leading to some savage episodes. No new