DISCOVERY OF PHOTOGRAPHY BY THOMAS WEDGWOOD. 379 



Mr. Josiah and Mr. Thomas Wedgwood enabled me to finish 

 my education in Germany. Instead of troubling others with 

 my own crude notions and juvenile compositions, I was 

 thenceforward better employed in attempting to store iny 

 own head with the wisdom of others/' * 



De Quincey, speaking of the friendship which existed 

 between Coleridge and the Wedgwoods, says : " Coleridge 

 attended Mr. Thomas Wedgwood, as a friend, throughout 

 the anomalous and affecting illness that brought him to the 

 grave. The external symptoms were torpor and morbid 

 irritability, together with everlasting restlessness. By way 

 of some relief, Mr. Wedgwood purchased a travelling car- 

 riage, and wandered up and down England, taking Coleridge 

 with him as a friend. By the death of Mr. Wedgwood, 

 Coleridge succeeded to a regular annuity of 75, which that 

 gentleman had bequeathed to him. The other Mr. Wedgwood 

 granted him an equal allowance." 



Mr. Thomas Wedgwood, who was never married, died in 

 the year 1805, at Gunville, Dorsetshire. He was a man of 

 considerable scientific attainments. During his father's 

 lifetime he prosecuted his studies with his aid and that 

 of Alexander Chisholm, and made such progress in his 

 researches into the properties of light, &c., that in 1792, 

 three years before the death of Josiah, he communicated to 

 the Royal Society an account of his " Experiments and 

 Observations on the Production of Light from different bodies 

 by Heat and by Attraction." His continued experiments 

 and researches resulted in the discovery of the process of 

 photography, and in 1802, in conjunction with Sir Humphrey 

 Davy, who assisted him in his experiments, he made those 

 discoveries known by a paper printed in the " Journal of the 



* The most graceful, elegant, and truly worthy memoir of Samuel 

 Taylor Coleridge which has ever been written and, indeed, the only one 

 which can be read with real pleasure is the one recently given in the 

 Art- Journal for February, 1865, from the pen of his friend and associate, 

 Mr. S. C. Hall, F.S. A. To this memoir a written portrait, word-painted 

 by a most worthy and able artist I cordially direct the attention of my 

 readers. 



