The Magician's Own Book, or, the Whole Art of Conjuring / Being a complete hand-book of parlor magic, and containing over one thousand optical, chemical, mechanical, magnetical, and magical experiments, amusing transmutations, astonishing sleights and subtleties, celebrated card deceptions, ingenious tricks with numbers, curious and entertaining puzzles, together with all the most noted tricks of modern performers.

by George Arnold; Frank Cahill

Fig. 16 is drawn upon two circles in combination with each other. The dotted lines of the plan will be readily perceived; but lest there should be any difficulty, they have been drawn separately in Fig. 17. With this duplex figure little skill will be required to present the lord of the farm yard. The three outlines, Figs. 18, 19, 20, are based upon the square turned diamond-wise, and will need no further remark: examples upon this plan may be multiplied easily. Those given will serve as hints in the several directions of flowers, foliage, and landscapes generally.

Before proceeding to show what may easily be done by a simple combination of the figures we have constructed, i. e., the oval, square, and circle, let me introduce another, which enters, by a kind of natural law, into almost all forms or groups of forms, namely, the triangle. Observe in the annexed cut, Fig. 21, how naturally, although unconsciously, the girl seats herself within one.

A moment's reflection will show, that from the little nymph in the cut to the great pyramid, everything that rests solidly upon the earth must take the form, more or less, of this broad-based tapering figure. Roofs of houses, churches, and towers, are all triangular in their form, as are all great trees, differing from each other only in the width of their angles.

Construct a triangle,[14] and trace it according to former directions, and from the examples, Figs. 22, 23, 24, look around you for others, and make various exercises upon this foundation.

Now, to proceed to something more complicated. Suppose you had either in your mind, or sketched out upon paper, the plan of a garden; that is to say, suppose you had the dimensions of a piece of ground, and intended to lay it out as a garden, allotting so much space to this and that bed, so much to gravel walks, and wanted to see how such an arrangement would look in perspective,—in other words, in reality, for perspective, however alarming it may look in books, with its net-work of lines, cross and across, like an insoluble riddle or a monster cobweb, is nothing more than the actual representation of things as they meet the eye.