COMPOSITE PORTRAITS, STEREOSCOPIC MAPS 263 



the photographer had his head well under the velvet 

 cloth, with his body bent, in the familiar attitude of 

 photographers while focusing, Alexander the Great 

 slid swiftly to his rear and administered a really good 

 bite to the unprotected hinder end of the poor 

 photographer, whose scared face emerging from 

 under the velvet cloth rises vividly in my memory as 

 I write this. The photographer guarded his rear 

 afterwards by posting himself in a corner of the 

 room. 



Many years later, I tried to perform the exact 

 opposite to composite photography, namely, to annul 

 all that was typical in a portrait and to preserve its 

 peculiarities. I called it ''Analytical Photography," 

 and explained it in Nature, 1900, and in the Photo. 

 Soc. Jour., 1900-1901. It depends on the fact that 

 a positive and a negative glass plate, both in half 

 or still fainter tones, when held face to face neutralise 

 the peculiarities of one another, so the effect of their 

 combination is to produce a uniform grey. My plan 

 was to fix a negative composite in front of a positive 

 portrait of one of its elements, all in half tones, with 

 the result that the composite abstracted all the 

 typical portion of the portrait while its peculiarities 

 were isolated and remained. " Alice in Wonderland " 

 would have described it as the " grin without the 

 Cheshire Cat." I succeeded, but the result did not 

 give an intelligible idea of the peculiarities, the non- 

 essentials being as strongly marked as the essentials, 

 and the whole making a jumble ; so I went no farther 

 with this process. 



In 1882 I published an illustrated memoir in 

 Nature on the conventional way in which artists 



