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February 27, 1891.] THE PHOTOGRAPHIC NEWS. 163 stiff paste, and to choose my own coloured binding paper, to using the adhesive strips supplied by dealers ; it is a convenience also to be able to cut the strip to any width required. A paste prepared as follows answers well, and is very adhesive :— Flour ... 1 ounce Alum 60 grains Camphor in fine powder ... ... ... 30 „ Water ... ... ... ... ... 5 ounces Mix well, and boil till thickened. This will keep well, but will remain good much longer if one grain of per chloride of mercury be added, and the paste preserved in a wide-mouthed corked bottle. THE PORTRAITURE OF THE MOON. BY JAMES MEW. “In what manner,” asked the wise men, “did you see the moon?” He answered them : “ As I was ascending the pass of the Edomites, and I saw her crouching between two rocks, with a head like a calf, ears like a kid, horns like a hart, and her tail between her legs, and, when I had given a glance at her, I trembled violently and fell backwards.” Such is an early account of the appearance of the moon, given in the Babylonian Talmud in the treatise on the New Year in the commencement of its second chapter. Among the many strange pictures of the moon which have been presented to the world by— shall we say—impressionist artists, this is probably not the least strange. But there is, beyond all doubt, some esoteric explanation of this marvellous vision of the moon which would be found, upon examination, to support the latest revelations of science. Dante, in the second canto of the Paradiso in his divine comedy, introduces himself to the reader in a novel situa tion. He is in the moon, and, being there, wisely takes the opportunity to ask his lady, Beatrice, who happens to be with him in that same “first star,” a question which has interested mankind at large for many ages, and if ever satisfactorily answered, will be so, probably, by the aid of photography. “ What,” he says, “are those black marks in the moon, which make the good folk down below on earth to utter their fables about Cain?” (Cain, it will be under stood, is the Italian individual equivalent of our generic man in the moon.) The answer of Beatrice is not wholly satisfactory ; it is, in fact, American. Her reply involves another question : “ What,” says she, “do you think of the matter yourself ?” Her own explanation is a little too complex and abstruse for the general public ; but the photographer will, perhaps, be interested in an optical illustration, which she suggests to Dante, derived from three mirrors placed at certain distances, and illuminated by a light proceeding from behind the experimentalist. In this matter of the moon the mind is astounded by the marvels seen by intelligent speculation. In the blessing of Joseph a benediction is invoked upon the territory of that patriarch “for the precious things put forth by the moon.” What these precious things may be is not precisely clear. An erudite ecclesiastic has sup posed them to be those vegetables which require a month to bring them to perfection, but refrains from further enlightening the public about what particular vegetables these are. May not rather these precious things put forth by the moon be the bounteous sheaves of interesting story, the entertaining portraitures, the thousand-and-one fancies of diverse growth, and place, and time, of which none are more celebrated than those which circle about her sole supposed inhabitant, commonly called “The Man in the Moon ?” It is for photography to explain to us who the man in the moon really is. Whether, indeed, the figure which meets our naked eyes be a man at all, and not, rather, a lion, as is the opinion of Albertus, or, as Eusebius prefers, a fox; or a hare, as is maintained by the Singalese ; or the soul of a sibyl, as is suggested by Plutarch; or a woman, Mary Magdalene, according to the pretty medival legend, which explains the lunar spots by her repentant tears. Let, however, so much be granted that the figure is that of a man. What manner and condition of man must still be told by the camera. Is it, for instance, Luna’s lover Endymion? Is it Cain proceeding—oh ! how slowly—up the mountain to sacrifice his offering of the fruits of the ground, which had so little respect from his Lord in com parison with the bloody butchery of his brother Abel ? Is it that unfortunate wight in Numbers, who, for gather ing sticks on the Sabbath day, was stoned with stones till he died, by the congregation of his own fellow-men, including, possibly, his own family circle, as the Lord commanded Moses ? In the elucidation of one particular in the man in the moon’s history even photography must be powerless. In Chaucer’s “Testament of Creseide,” Lady Cynthia, in a grey gown full of black spots, is shown to the reader with a churl painted upon her breast, bearing a bush of thorns on his back, which he is said to have stolen, and for that felony he is transported to the moon, and may climb no nearer heaven. The theft here is the crime, and not the Sabbath breaking, a circumstance which, though it dim inishes the disproportion of the punishment, cannot, any more than that sin for which it is a substitute, be distin guished by the camera. To determine this business satis factorily is the province less of the photographer than of the historian. Heit is, also, who must explain the pre sence of the dog, an intrusive and later feature in the original legend, recognized in Shakespeare’s time ; for did not Caliban’s fair mistress, Miranda, in “The Tempest,” show him that dog, in addition to the man and the bush ? And in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” the carpenter, Quince, is not satisfied with this, but must needs introduce a lantern in addition. One must come in, he says, with a bush of thorns and a lantern, and say he comes to disfigure or to present the person of Moonshine. It is in the nature of all legends to grow, as this legend of the man in the moon has grown. Successive narrators imagine successive incidents to give a roundness to their romance. The dog and the lantern were brought into the picture as probable accompaniments of the man, and very likely from some far-off sense of the eternal fitness of things. It remains for the camera to relegate them to their proper situations—anywhere, indeed, except in the moon. Seeing is believing, according to a vulgar pro verb,and when people find neither dog, nor lantern, nor thorn bush, nor man in the moon’s photograph, they will, perhaps, cease to believe in them, except some few, who may urge that those are all to be discovered on that other side which has never yet been beheld by human eyes. Legend after legend will thus disappear upon comparison with the moon’s true portrait. For instance, that of the New Zealanders, who speak of one of themselves in a far back time, a certain Rona, who went by night for water to his well; what time he slipped and fell, and sprained his ankle, he saw the moon falling also rapidly upon him. Then he seized