Daguerre And The French Academy

At a meeting of the French Academy of Sciences, held in Paris on the 19th day of August, 1839, Louis Jacques Mande Daguerre, in the presence of the flower of Parisian art, literature and science, gave a demonstration of his new-discovery - the Daguerreotype. The success of the seance was complete, and the gathering of illustrious men was intoxicated with enthusiasm in favour of the Daguerreotype. It is, then, almost fifty years ago that the result of the work of the father of photography, Joseph Nicephore de Niepce, who had died six years previously, and of the partner of his latter days - Daguerre - was given to the French public, for though Arago declared that " France had adopted the discovery and was proud to hand it as a present to the whole world" Daguerre, sharp business man that he was, took out a patent for his process in England on the 15th of July, 1839.

It may be said, then, that for fifty years the influence of photography has been working amongst the people for better for worse; but a short half-century has photography had to develop, and we naturally feel a little curious to know what it has been doing all that time. Has the art been lying idle and stagnating, or has it been developing and extending its roots into all the industrial, scientific and artistic fields of enterprise? Let us see what this cool young goddess, born of art and science, who generally comes to stay and finally to oust the old goddesses from their temples, has been doing these fifty years.

Retrospect Of Progress Of Photography In Astronomy

In the fields of science she has been most busy. She has been giving us photographs of the moon, the stars, and even of the nebulae. She has recorded eclipses and a transit of Venus for us. She has drawn too the Sun's corona, and registered those great volcanic explosions which playfully take place there periodically. She has shown us that there are stars which no telescope can find, and she has in another form registered for us the composition of the sun and of many of the stars; and now she is busy mapping out the heavens. Like an all-powerful goddess, she plays with the planets and records on our plates, with delicate taps, the stars. She runs through the vast space of the kosmos doing our biddings with a precision and delicacy never equalled - in short she is fast becoming the right hand of the astronomer.

Microscopy

Not content with her vast triumphs in space over the infinitely great, she dives down to the infinitely small, and stores up for us portraits of the disease-bearing generation of Schizomycetes, the stiff-necked bacteria, and the wriggling vibrio, the rolling microccus, and the fungoid actinomycosis - with deadly tresses; these she pictures for us, so that we may either keep them on small plates, or else she throws them on large screens so that we are enabled to study their structure. On these screens too we can gaze on the structure of the Proteus-like white blood corpuscle, and we are able to study the very cells of our tongues, our eyes, our bones, our teeth, our hairs, and to keep drawings of them such as man never had before. So the kindly bright goddess stints us in nothing, for wherever the microscope leads there will she be found at our bidding. With the greatness of an all-seeing mind, it matters not to her whether she draws the protococcus or the blood-cells of an elephant, whether she depicts the eroding cancer cell or the golden scale on the butterfly's wing - anything that we ask of her she does; if we will but be patient.

Chemistry

But the little goddess, the light-bearer, is not content with these sciences but she must needs go and woo chemistry and register the belted zones of the spectrum and tell us the mysterious secrets of the composition of matter.

Meteorology Surveying

Meteorology, too, has claimed her, and she draws for the meteorologist the frowning nimbus and the bright rolling cumulus. She scratches quickly on his plate the lightning's flash, and even measures the risings and fallings of the mercuries in his long glass barometers and thin-stemmed thermometers, so that the meteorologist can go and rest in the sun; and good-naturedly, too, she hints to him that his registerings are but fumblings after her precise and delicate work. This versatile little goddess, too, is playing with and hinting to the surveyors how she will not be coy if they will but woo her, for, says she, "have I not already shown you how to measure the altitude of mountains, and how to project maps by my aid?"

Geography

The geographer, too, is another lover well favoured by the dainty goddess, he always takes her on his travels now-a-days, and brings us back her inimitable drawings of skulls, savages, weapons, waterfalls, geological strata, fossils, animals, birds, trees, landscapes, and men, and we believe him when we know the light-bearer was with him, and soon in all his geographies, in all his botanies, in all his zoologies, in all his geologies, his entomologies, and all the rest of his valuable "ologies," we shall find the crisp and inimitable drawings of his dainty companion.