SCIENCE AND FINE ART. 761 



"would need to have witnessed Daguerre's discovery, and Ara- 

 go's report upon it in the Chamber of Deputies, to realize the 

 enthusiasm with which it filled the world. Daguerre's particular 

 process, of only limited application, was soon cast in the shade by 

 one which in its essentials is still in use. But it deserves, perhaps, 

 to be remembered that when the first still imperfect Talbotype 

 process reached us from England nobody foresaw its immense 

 future, and the substitution for the silver plate of paper impreg- 

 nated with a salt of silver was received with shaking of heads, 

 and was looked upon as a step backward. 



Thus photography started upon its wonderful career of vic- 

 tory. It soon assumed the relation to art that Arago had prom- 

 ised for it. Not only has it lightened the work of the archi- 

 tectural, interior, and landscape painter, and made the camera 

 lucida superfluous even for panoramas; it has also furnished 

 many useful hints relative to light and shadow, reflection and 

 half-tone, and especially as to the way to give the most natural 

 appearance of bodily projection to figures on a flat. It might be 

 profitable, for the sake of forming a judgment in both directions, 

 to inquire what part photography has had in the origin of the 

 newer schools of painting, of the mannerism of the impressionists, 

 and of the clear-light and free-light painters. It has taught the 

 landscape painter how to reproduce rocks with geological and 

 vegetation with botanical correctness, and to represent glaciers, 

 which was rarely attempted before, and never successfully. It 

 fixed the image of the clouds, although its. pictures of the sky 

 were somewhat defective. Finally, it helped the portrait painter 

 without exciting his envy, for, while it caught up only a single 

 often long- while tense expression, it was not adequate to give an 

 average picture of the man, and the unpleasant, stiff photograph 

 was almost proverbially a bad portrait. It furnished painters, 

 however, in many instances with an invaluable groundwork, 

 although it had to be enlivened by the artistic touch. But the 

 newer form of portrait photography is calculated to attract the 

 attention of the artist in many points. Instantaneous photogra- 

 phy catches the expression of the countenance and the attitudes 

 during so short an interval that it makes good what escapes in 

 the average expression, and thus leads to most valuable observa- 

 tions. Duchenne and Darwin* recreated the doctrine of expres- 

 sion in emotion ; the former by counterfeiting the various ex- 

 pressions by means of electrical stimulation of the muscles of the 

 face, and the latter by following their phylogenetic development 

 through the series of animals. Both presented the artist with 

 photographic images of such expressions by the side of which 



* The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. London, 1872. 



