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August 31, 1883. ] THE PHOTOGRAPHIC NEWS. 553 that is, for all time ; although the gallop of a greyhound, the flight of a bird, the procession of the clouds in the sky, and of the waves of the sea, can be instantaneously photo graphed ; and although as a social benefactor in bringing the ends of the earth together, and drawing all humanity into sympathetic intercommunication, photography rivals steam, the electric telegraph, and cheap postage, still the veil is not yet wholly lifted ; the [what do our readers suppose is the gigantic discovery the Telegraph has made ? Why, that] the laws of photographic focussing are yet un- perfectly understood." Wonderful! The sentence from which we have quoted has by no means come to an end, but we have given quite enough to justify the question: Was it worth so much fine writing to arrive at such a ridicu lously small conclusion ? That the writers in the dailies were well agreed upon the main points was not due so much to the absence of any debateable matter as to the circumstance that most all of them went for their facts to the same encyclopaedia. Of all the journals, the Standard was the most generously inclined towards photography, stoutly averring that there is decidedly fine art in photography ; for, says our contem porary, “ it is just as difficult to produce a good artistic sun-picture as it is to produce one by the aid of pencil and colour tube. So long as Art involves something more than mere work for eye and hand this will remain so, and we are more likely to see photography elevated to Art, than Art degraded to the mechanical multiplication of images.” Into one error nearly all our contemporaries appear to have fallen, curiously enough; they seem to have taken it for granted that Daguerreotype is as dead as the clever artiste-peintre whose marble bust was unveiled at Cormeilles on Sunday. So far from Daguerreotype being obsolete, it may safely be said that no other photographic process is so suitable for scientific work where micrometer measurements have to be made. Dry albumen and dry collodion films are more trustworthy in this respect than wet collodion or gelatine, but the Daguerreotype plate is the best of all when fine measurements of the photographic image require to be taken. We spoke last week of the circum-polar stations insti tuted by international endeavour, and mentioned that good news had arrived from the Austrian station, whose ob servers, besides other work, had secured an extensive series of photographs of the icy district in their neighbourhood. Of the most northern of the stations, that established by the United States, no news of any kind has, unfortunately, yet come in, and it is feared that the relief party sent out this summer will not be able to reach it. The ob servers are located as far north as Captain Nares pene trated when the last Franklin expedition was undertaken, and they have been instructed to make their return at all cost, if not relieved this autumn. The results obtained at these observatories round the North Pole should give us a valuable insight into the Polar world. “ Drawings for competition should be sketched with open lines like the above,” says the new publication called Scraps, “ so that they may be fined down, as in the pic ture below, by photographic reduction."