Proneness to Mysticism.

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'strong, but not for the feeble; for the holy, but not for sinners. It is made for an imaginary man, and abandons the real man to all the weaknesses of his nature.' The promise of grace allured M. de Biran to Jesus Christ. It was the winning voice of the meek and lowly One sounding so clearly through all time, 'Come unto me, all ye who labour and are heavy laden, and 'I will give you rest,' which thrilled and drew his heart. Another attraction, however, held his soul in allegiance to Jesus Christ. In Him the ideal of human perfection was fulfilled, and shone in grace and glory. The will reigned supremely, without the tremulousness of a moment's faltering, over the weakness or violence of passions. And in Him the will, thus crowned, abode in the unbroken peace and almighty strength of communion with the Father. His ideal was accomplished, and grace was offered him, likewise, to accomplish it. These are the two magnets which drew him to his Lord. The external evidences of Christianity exercised little influence upon him, but the internal evidence which grew brighter the more fully he imbibed its spirit and practised its lessons, became the stay of his belief. He realised the effects of faith in a manner which his trained powers of internal observation made him peculiarly acute and attentive to discern. He finds, indeed, that this habit of reflection is injurious. Man has to live, not to watch how he lives; and his warning is impressive, The habit of occupying oneself speculatively with that which passes in oneself-the evil as well as the good-can it be immoral? I fear it, judging from my own experience. It is necessary to give oneself an aim, a point d'appui out of oneself, and higher than oneself, in order to react with success upon one's own modifications.' In this way, his religious faith, grounded upon the deep sentiments of the heart, and not sufficiently corrected and enlightened by the truths of revelation, was prone to speculative excess. The third life of man, he says, is the resignation and sacrifice of the will from love to God. As the will rises from the blind necessity of the lowest life of sense, so it passes at length into the blessed necessity of the highest life of love. His language, though strikingly suggestive, wears the mystical hues of his favourite authors, à Kempis and Fenelon. The will he had exalted so highly, he now seems to humiliate. But the cause of these expressions, which border on a mystical quietism, we believe to be that the roused depths of his spiritual life had not time to gather themselves into repose, and to find out an adequate and lucid utterance. The water-courses foam with a hurrying tumult when the early and the latter rains descend. Let us

hope that the same cause prevented M. de Biran's recognition and expression of the great doctrines of atonement and pardon. His philosophical system found no place for duty, so his religious system has no place, apparently, for guilt and forgiveness. His cry is for grace to help, not for grace to atone. So far he resembles many in our time who rob Christianity of its righteousness and peace, and who have not his excuse. They are denying truth they have known. To him the fulness of the grace in Christ was gradually unfolding itself. It was the deep thirst of his soul he came to slake at the fountain of redeeming love:rest for the weary, strength for the weak. And this thirst was quenched. Mayhap in the sick months which preceded death, when the vision of a disenchanted life lay behind him, and the vision of a judgment lay before him, the sinner confessed his guilt as well as his weakness; and we know the Lord of Infinite Pity would then bear his sins as He had already borne his sorrows. The last phrase written in his journal points to this hope. It sums up his Christian faith, it typifies his Christian life here and in glory. 'The stoic is alone, or with a con'sciousness of force which deceives him. The Christian only I walks in the presence of God and with God, by the Mediator whom he has taken for the guide and companion of his present ' and his future life.'

ART. II.—(1.) History and Practice of Photogenic Drawing. By L. J. M. DAGUERRE. 1839.

(2.) On the Application of the Chemical Rays of Light to the Purposes of Pictorial Reproduction. By Sir J. F. W. HERSCHEL, K.H., F.R.S.

On the Action of the Rays of the Solar Spectrum on Vegetable Colours, and on some New Photographic Processes. By the Same.

On Certain Improvements on Photographic Processes, and on the Parathermic Rays of the Solar Spectrum. By the Same.

Philosophical Transactions, 1839-43.

(3.) Researches on Light in its Chemical Relations. By ROBERT HUNT, F.R.S. Second Edition. 1854.

(4.) The Journal of the Photographic Society. Edited by H. W. DIAMOND, M.D., F.S.A. Vols. I.-X. 1853-66.

(5.) The Photographic News. Edited by G. WHARTON SIMPSON, M.A. Vols. I.-IX. 1858-65.

(6.) The Year-Book of Photography. 1861-66.

(7.) The Total Eclipse of the Sun, July 18th, 1860. By WARREN

DE LA RUE, F.R.S. (Proceedings of the Roy. Soc., April, 1862.)

(8.) Traité de l'Impression Photographique ans Sels d'Argent. Par ALPHONSE POITEVIN.

1862.

(9.) Traité Général de Photographie. Par D. V. MONKHOVEN. Cinquième Edition.

1865.

(10.) L'Art de la Photographie. Par DISDERI. 1862.

(11.) Principles and Practice of Photography. By JABEZ HUGHES. Sixth Edition. 1865.

1865.

(12.) Photography: Its History, Position, and Prospects. A Lecture. By the Hon. J. WILLIAM STRUTT. (13.) Researches on Solar Physics. By WARREN DE LA RUE, Ph.D., F.R.S.; BALFOUR STEWART, M.A., F.R.S.; and BENJAMIN LOEWY. 1865.

WITH photography as a prominent fact of the day, essentially belonging to the nineteenth century, everybody is familiar. Its origin, growth, and variety of application have had no parallel in the history of the graphic and pictorial arts. But notwithstanding that its results are to be found in every part of the civilized globe, amongst the most cherished treasures of every home, that it is the recognised, unerring recorder of science, the auxiliary of the law, the willing assistant of the painter and the sculptor, for whom it does yeoman's service, the art itself is without a history. The records of its first days, although scarcely reaching beyond the present generation, are meagre and fragmentary. To the initial facts upon which it is based we find occasional allusions as early as the sixteenth century, some of the alchemists regarding solar action as one source of the transmutation of metals, a conclusion doubtless derived from their observation that chloride of silver, known to them as luna cornua, was changed in colour by the rays of the sun. A century later, in 1777, the illustrious chemist, Scheele, records some interesting experiments on the same properties in this salt; but his discoveries remained dead facts, without application; and it was not until the commencement of the present century that the possibility of drawing by sunlight assumed a definite shape in men's minds.

In 1802, Thomas Wedgwood, the son of the celebrated potter, published in the Journal of the Royal Institution An account of a Method of Copying Paintings upon Glass, and of making 'Profiles by the Agency of Light upon Nitrate of Silver;' 'Observations,' by Sir Humphry Davy, who had assisted in the experiments, accompanying the paper. In the brief but interesting record of their experiments, after learning that 'muriate of silver' was found to be more sensitive than nitrate of silver, that white leather when prepared was more sensitive than paper,

and that although the images of the camera obscura could not be secured in any moderate time, yet those of the solar microscope could be copied on prepared paper without difficulty. We also learn the fatal fact, that no attempts that have been made to prevent the uncoloured parts of the copy or profile from being ' acted upon by light, have as yet been successful.' They had discovered but half the spell; the pictures could not be fixed. The agency they had invoked continued its work until the images first produced by its aid were destroyed by its continued action, and a blackened sheet of paper was all that remained. Although these efforts were unsuccessful, and the idea seemed for some time abandoned, yet from this time we find the science of the sunbeam gaining increased attention, and the Transactions of the Royal Society and other learned bodies began to furnish trustworthy records of the researches into the chemical action of the solar rays, which initiated photography as a science, and immediately preceded its advent as an art.

It is somewhat curious to note that, whilst the actual history of photography is a thing of yesterday, we find premonitions of such a mode of delineation at a period long anterior to its existence, either as a fact or a subject of research. In Fenelon's Fables, under the title of Voyage Supposé, 1690,' a visit to the Island of Wonders is described, a country in which no painter dwelt, but when a portrait or picture was desired, the reflection of the object was obtained in a liquid placed in gold or silver vessels; the water shortly congealed and retained permanently the image which had been mirrored on its surface. In 1760, Tiphaigne de la Roche, in a singular book, with a title annagrammatized from his own name into Giphantie á Babylone, supposed himself transported into the palace of the genii of the elements, and there learns that these genii can arrest and retain the reflected images of objects made in the 'twinkling of an eye.' Cloth was prepared with a subtle adhesive material, which shone like a mirror, and possessed the power to retain on its viscous surface the momentary images reflected there, and being dried in the dark the picture became ineffaceable. The problems involved in such a method of securing the fleeting images of objects, the dreamer proposed for the solution of the philosophers of his day.†

"Il n'y avait aucun peintre dans tout le pays, mais quand ou voulait avoir le portrait d'un ami, un beau paysage, ou un tableau, qui representât quelque autre objet, un mettait à l'eau dans de grande bassins d'or et d'argent; puis ou opposait cette eau à l'objet qu'on voulait peindre. Bientot l'eau, se congelant, devenait comme une glacé de miroir, ou l'image demeurait ineffaçable. Ou l'emportait ou l'ou voulait, et c'etait un tableau aussi fidèle que les plus poli glacés de miroir."-Les Fables de Fénélon.

"It is curious to observe, in passing, the frequency of these coinci

Discovery of Iodine, Bromine, etc.

349

It is not a little noteworthy, however, that whilst photography as a fact dates back little more than a quarter of a century, photography as a possibility, at least in the phases in which it is now known and practised, is confined to a period scarcely less recent, as almost all the elements employed in the first step taken in obtaining a photograph-the production of the negative-are of recent discovery. The sensitive salts, without the aid of which a negative is impossible, consist of iodides and bromides, and the now indispensable vehicle is collodion; chlorides being now used only in the secondary operation of printing. Iodine, the primary element, was unknown until 1812, when it was discovered by M. Courtois, of Paris. Bromine, an imperatively necessary aid to successful work, was not discovered until 1826, whilst collodion is a still younger child of chemical science. Other of the agents commonly used in photography are of recent origin; but these we have mentioned are the very bases on which the art rests, not simply in its existing modes, but in any form we know in which it could be used as the accurate registrar of transient effects, or to secure pictures of objects in life and motion. Thus photography, as a practical fact, came into existence almost as soon as the agents upon which its practice depends were known to science.

Before noticing its most recent developments, a brief glance at the first definite stages in the history of this new art-science may be desirable. The experiments of Wedgwood and Sir Humphry Davy closed without leaving any more tangible result than the indication of a wondrous possibility. To a recluse philosopher residing at Chalons-sur-Saone, however, the first realization of this possibility was given. Joseph Nicéphore de Niepce commenced his labours in 1814, with a view to give a permanent embodiment to the fleeting images of the camera obscura. Led by what suggestions or inducements we know not, his researches were directed to a channel totally different from that to which his predecessors had given attention. They had experimented with certain salts of silver: he turned his attention dences, or poetic previsions of scientific discovery. The anticipatory allusions of Darwin to the advent of steam have been often quoted. In a number of the Guardian, issued a century and a half ago (Tuesday, July 28th, 1713), there is an account cited of a Chimerical Correspondence between two friends by the help of a certain loadstone which had such a virtue in it, that if it touched two several needles, the other, though at ever so great a distance, moved at the same time and in the same manner as a dial-plate provided with letters, to which the needles might point, which enabled the friends to communicate with each other instantly, and hold conversation when separated by continents. similarity between this conception and the actual working of the electric telegraph is almost startling."

NO. LXXXVIII.

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The