PANORAMAS. 91 



which in some cases mingle years afterwards by a wonderful 

 illusion with the remembrances of natural scenes actually 

 beheld. Hitherto, panoramas, which are only effective when 

 they are of large diameter, have been applied chiefly to 

 views of cities and of inhabited districts, rather than to 

 scenes in which nature appears decked with her own wild 

 luxuriance and beauty. Enchanting effects might be ob- 

 tained by means of characteristic studies sketched on the rug- 

 ged mountain declivities of the Himalaya and the Cordilleras, 

 or in the recesses of the river country of India and South 

 America ; and still more so if these sketches were aided by 

 photographs, which cannot indeed render the leafy canopy, but 

 would give the most perfect representation possible of the form 

 of the giant trunks, and of the mode of ramification characte- 

 ristic of the different kinds of trees. All the methods to 

 which I have here alluded are fitted to enhance the love of 

 the study of nature ; it appears, indeed, to me, that if large 

 panoramic buildings, containing a succession of such land- 

 scapes, belonging to different geographical latitudes and dif- 

 ferent zones of elevation, were erected in our cities, and, like 

 our museums and galleries of paintings, thrown freely open 

 to the people, it would be a powerful means of rendering 

 the sublime grandeur of the creation more widely known and 

 felt. The comprehension of a natural whole, the feeling of 

 the unity and harmony of the Cosmos, will become at once 

 more vivid and more generally diffused, with the multipli- 

 cation of all modes of bringing the phenomena of nature 

 generally before the contemplation of the eye and of the mind. 



VOL. II. 



