then tell at a single glance which edition of a
celebrated work he would select, by looking
at the miniature photographic portrait of its
title-page. An Antiquarian Photographic
Society has just been started, in which each
member is to give to all the others copies in
photograph of any objects interesting to
all—a gift too costly by any other mode of
engraving or drawing.

In science, too, photography has done
strange things. It is one among the many
unexpected ties of union in natural agencies
and processes, that that very sun which has
so much to do with temperature, and
atmospheric pressure, and dew, and rain, and
terrestrial magnetism, should now be called
upon to assist in registering all these
phenomena—he achieves the great results of his
own natural powers, and he then makes a
record of his results at the bidding of man.
This is no exaggeration of what has been
developed by the ingenuity of Mr. Brooke.
Every one will at once see, that to obtain a
perfect record of the indications of the
barometer, the thermometer, the hygrometer,
the anemometer, the dipping needle, the
declination needle, and other meteorological
instruments, so that the whole state of the
atmosphere at any one time might be
compared with that at any other time, it would
be requisite that an observer should be
stationed at each instrument night and day
continually, to note down the frequent and
often unexpected changes. It is the purport
of Mr. Brooke's invention to save all this
trouble; to make the phenomena register
themselves; and moreover to do this more
accurately than any observer could accomplish
this. A delicate piece of mechanism it is.

If we are ever to know what the Man in
the Moon is doing, how he lives, what sort of
a house he possesses, what kind of weather
he meets with, whether he has any dogs and
cats and hares around him, and armies to
fight, and steam-engines to work for him,—
if we are destined ever to know these things,
assuredly the photograph will take a great
part in eliciting the information. Even now
the photographic portraits of the moon are
wonderful achievements. A careful astronomer
thought that if, for the nonce, he
converted the object-glass of his magnificent
telescope into a camera, he might, perhaps,
procure a photograph of the moon's visible
surface. A lens, three inches in diameter,
catches a hundred and fifty times more light
than the pupil of the eye; and one fifteen
inches in diameter catches twenty or thirty
times as much as the smaller lens; so that
the moon, which yields to the naked eye too
small a quantity of light to photograph its
own image, may yield amply sufficient by aid
of a large and powerful lens. This is the
secret of what has been effected. The
astronomer placed a prepared silver plate in the
focus of a large telescope; he directed the
telescope towards the moon, and made it
follow the moon's course in its daily arc: he
left the moon's light to do the rest. There
was produced an exquisite miniature of the
moon, about as large as a crown piece; with
the peaks, and ring-shaped elevations, and
round and oval patches, and dark and light
spots, and serrated shadows, and mountain
peaks, separated by cavities and craters; and
the more closely this little miniature was
examined by a microscope, the more clearly did
the minute details of the lunar surface become
developed. Other astronomers may have done
this also; but the honour is due to an
American, Professor Bond, of having been the first
to surmount the difficulties of this delicate
experiment.

Nay, the photograph itself may be an
astronomical discoverer: it may tell us
something of asteroids and distant planets which
we wot not of. When the astronomers of
England and France were busily searching
the heavens for the far distant planet, which
two bold mathematicians had predicted, one
of them actually saw the wished-for stranger,
but without knowing that it was a stranger.
It has been suggested, that if there had
existed photographic maps of the stars, taken
at a few evenings apart, there might have
been something to show that one of these
stars was the remote Neptune. And it is
also considered that, as the stars emit different
kinds of light, and as different kinds of
light affect photographic surfaces differently,
we may by and by obtain some new and
highly curious information concerning stars
and planets and their light. One of the stars
in the constellation Lyra has already
presented a photographic portrait of itself; and
it has been calculated, from the supposed,
but almost inexpressible distance of that
star, that the light took more than twenty
years in travelling from the star to the
prepared silver or paper surface. If so, this is
perhaps the slowest example of portrait-
painting on record. But let us now say a
little concerning commerce and manufactures,
in connection with photography.

The commercial world becomes every now
and then a little alarmed, and not unreasonably
so, at the startling strides made by
science: fearful lest the necessary caution
observed in trading matters should be
occasionally over-dazzled by the brilliancy of
modern discoveries. Thus, as photography
is copying all sorts of productions, why not
copy a Bank of England note? In the
autumn of eighteen hundred and fifty-three,
there was a little stir in this matter. Certain
paragraphs appeared in the London
newspapers, stating that fraud had been
practised on the Bank by means of
photographic counterfeits of bank-notes. The
alarm elicited many suggestions: among
which, one was that the notes should be
printed on white paper, as usual, but that
the paper should be covered with a tasteful
design, printed in colours, and so beyond