he last two years,
and in mid-day (June), prepared calotype paper, and also the collodion
glass plates, for the camera, under a tent of glazed yellow calico of only
a single thickness: the light admitted is very great, but does not in the
least injure the most sensitive plate or paper. It is made square like a
large bag, so that in a room I can use it double as a blind; and out of
doors, in a high wind, I have crept into it, and prepared my paper opposite
the object I intended to calotype.

I should be glad it any of your readers would inform me how a failed
negative calotype can be restored to its original strength. I last year
took a great number, some of which have nearly faded away; and others are
as strong, and as able to be used to print from, as when first done. The
paper was prepared with the single iodide of silver solution, and rendered
sensitive with aceto-nitrate sil. and gallic acid in the usual way. I
attribute the fading to the hyposulphate not being got rid of; and the
question is, Can the picture he restored?

Are DR. DIAMOND'S _Notes_ published yet?

S. S. B., Jun.

* * * * *

Replies to Minor Queries.

_Gibbon's Library_ (Vol. vii., p. 407.).--I visited it in 1825, in company
with Dr. Scholl, of Lausanne, who took charge of it for Mr. Beckford. It
was sold between 1830 and 1835, partly by auction, partly by private sale
in detail.

JAMES DENNISTOUN.

_Robert Drury_ (Vol. v., p. 533.).--I am afraid that the credit attachable
to Drury's _Madagascar_ is not supported or strengthened by the
announcement that the author was "every day to be spoken with" at Old Tom's
Coffee House in Birchin Lane. _The Apparition of Mrs. Veal_, and other
productions of a similar description, should make us very doubtful as
regards the literature of the earlier part of the eighteenth century. Might
not a person have been suborned to represent the fictitious Robert Drury,
to the benefit of the coffee-house keeper as well as the publisher? I am
induced to express this suspicion by a parallel case of the same period.
_The Ten Years' Voyages of Captain George Roberts_, London, 1726, is
universally, I {486} believe, considered fictitious, and ascribed to Defoe;
yet at the end of the work we find:

"N. B.--The little boy so often mentioned in the foregoing sheets, now
lives with Mr. Galapin, a tobacconist, in Monument Yard; and may be
referred to for the truth of most of the p