ABSTRACT
NO other of our nineteenth century inventions is at once so beautiful, so precious, so popular, so appreciated as photography. It is exercising a beneficial influence over the social sentiments, the arts, the sciences of the whole world—an influence not the less real because it is wide-spread and unobtrusive. The new art cherishes domestic and friendly feelings by its ever-present transcripts of the familiar faces, keeping fresh the memory of the distant and the dead; it keeps alive our admiration of the great and the good by presenting us with the lineaments of the heroes, the saints, the sages of all lands. It gratifies, by faithful portrayals of scenes of grandeur and beauty, the eyes of him who has neither wealth nor leisure for travel. It has improved pictorial art by sending the painter to the truths of nature; it has reproduced his works with marvellous fidelity; it has set before the multitude the finest works of the sculptor. It is lending invaluable aid to almost every science. The astronomer now derives his mathematical data from the photograph; by its aid the architect superintends the erection of distant buildings, the engineer watches over the progress of his designs in remote lands, the medical man amasses records of morbid anatomy, the geologist studies the anatomy of the earth, the ethnologist obtains faithful transcripts of the features of every race. To the mind of an intelligent reader numberless instances will present themselves, not only of the utility of photography in the narrower sense of the term, but of its higher utility in ministering to our love of the beautiful in art and in nature.
