it be coated with certain chemical preparations.
Silvered copper, plain paper, waxed
paper, glass—all will serve as " panels " or
"canvases" for this universal genius. And
now he has adopted a new ground-work; he
produces his pictures on wood. A process
has lately been devised, whereby portraits,
landscapes, and other subjects, can be
produced on any smooth piece of wood. Once
let this art surmount a few practical
difficulties, and we may soon see wooden snuff-
boxes and hand-screens, and other minor
elegancies decorated with portraits, or scenes
from nature, or copies from celebrated
pictures, by photographic aid. Nay: a suggestion
has been thrown out, whether photography
might be applied to wood blocks for wood
engravers, for certain purposes making the
drawings by light instead of by hand.

There is a battle going on between the
high-toned artists and the practical men, as
to the extent to which photography can
justifiably be used in art. The aesthetic
advocates view the optical stranger with some
distrust, and fear that the power of taking
dozens of copies of works of art with very
little trouble will disentitle those copies to
be designated works of art at all. Some of
our eminent men, however—eminent as true
artists—declare they are ready to avail
themselves of the art of photography, in
certain tedious details of their art. A story
is told of a noble peeress, whose portrait was
painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence; both the
peeress and the artist became tired and cross
during the imitation of a satin dress; the
impatience of stillness in the one, and the
requirement of stillness insisted on by the
other, nearly occasioned a collision of
tempers. Now it has been urged that the
photograph might render admirable aid to an
artist, in hundreds of instances such as this.
Mechanical exactness the photograph can
realise, beyond the power of the eye or the
pencil to imitate; and there is ample reason
to believe that, after accepting aid of this
kind in mechanical details, there will always
be abundant scope left for the genius of the
true artist.

The publication of photographic prints has
not yet extended far in England; but in
Paris copies of celebrated buildings are sold
in large numbers and at low prices. From one
negative, many positives may be obtained;
as the processes become more and more
familiar, the price at which such articles may
be sold will become lessened. We have had
an example of this kind of art in relation to
the Great Exhibition. The Commissioners
caused to be prepared, for presentation to
the foreign courts, and to a few distinguished
bodies, magnificent copies of the Illustrated
Catalogue and the Jury Reports, adorned
with a large number of photographs relating
to exhibited articles; of these photographs
there were as many of each taken as there
were presentation copies of the whole work;
and thus there was a reduplication, or
publication, equivalent to that whereby prints of
the ordinary kind are diffused among the
nations of the world. The great power of
multiplication is one secret of the importance
of the more recent photographic processes.
Daguerre and Talbot, the two chief discoverers
in this beautiful art, differed widely in this
respect. Daguerre's process gives inverted
or reverted pictures, without any power of
reproduction or multiplication; but in
Talbot's process there is a " negative "
produced, whence dozens, or scores, or hundreds
of " positives " may be obtained—all cast in
the same mould, so to speak.

The power of seeing things when out of
sight, as Don Whiskerandos might have said,
is given by the aid of photographic pictures.
Thus, an English engineer has been
constructing, over the Dnieper at Kieff, the most
magnificent suspension bridge, perhaps, which
the world possesses. The puissant Emperor,
far away from Kieff, but impatiently longing
to know how the work progressed, caused
photographs to be sent to him periodically,
showing the exact state of the bridge at a
given time. Two thousand miles of distance
were thus practically annihilated; the Czar
could know all that was going on, without
stirring from his palace at St. Petersburg,
by comparing the photographs successively
forwarded to him. Stages of progress, in
numerous works of art and of ingenuity, can
thus be easily registered, as it were; for each
photograph tells a true tale concerning a
particular spot at a particular time.

Let us now go from art to literature, and
see how photography speeds there.

A correspondent of Notes and Queries,
in the early part of the present year, asks
whether photography might not be well
employed in making fac-similes of valuable
and rare ancient manuscripts? He suggests
that if copies of such manuscripts could be
multiplied at a moderate price, there are
many proprietors of libraries who would be
glad to obtain such copies, which, for all
purposes of reference, would answer equally
well with the original. The editor of the
journal in question coincides with this view,
and adds, " We have now before us a
photographic copy of a folio page of a manuscript
of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, on
which are inscribed a number of characters;
and although the copy is reduced so as to be
but about two inches high and one and a half
broad, it is perfectly legible, and the whole of
the contractions are as distinct as if the original
vellum was before us." There has been an
announcement that a catalogue of the National
Library (perhaps now the Imperial Library)
of Paris is in preparation, in which a
photographic fac-simile of the title-page of each
work, in miniature, will be registered—one
of the most remarkable means of obtaining
rigorous accuracy in catalogues that could
possibly be conceived. A bibliopolist could