CHAP.V. NEW APPLICATIONS OF LIGHT. 39 



only can we account for the pictures in some old voyages, 

 showing an English sailor and a Patagonian as a dwarf 

 beside a giant ; and for the statement by the historian of 

 Magellan's voyage, that their tallest sailor only came up 

 to the waist of the first man they met. It is now known 

 that the average height of Patagonian men is about five 

 feet ten inches, or five feet eleven inches, and none have 

 been found to exceed six feet four inches. Photography 

 would have saved us from such an error as this. 



There will always be work for good artists, especially 

 in the domain of color and of historical design; but the 

 humblest photographer is now able to preserve for us, 

 and for future generations, minutely accurate records of 

 scenes in distant lands, of the ruins of ancient temples 

 which are sometimes the only record of vanished races, 

 and of animals or plants that are rapidly disappearing 

 through the agency of man. And, what is still more im- 

 portant, they can preserve for us the forms and faces 

 of the many lower races which are slowly but surely 

 dying out before the rude incursions of our imperfect 

 civilization. 



That such a new and important art as photography 

 should have had its birth, and have come to maturity, so 

 closely coincident with the other great discoveries of the 

 century already alluded to, is surely a very marvellous 

 fact, and one which will seem more extraordinary to the 

 future historian than it does to ourselves, who have wit- 

 nessed the whole process of its growth and development. 



The most recent of all the discoveries in connection 

 with light and photography, and one which extends our 

 powers of vision in a direction and to an extent the limits 

 of which cannot yet be guessed at, is that peculiar form 



