early days of the
Photographic Art to the important epoch of the announcement of the
Daguerreotype, I shall defer the subsequent history of the Art to a future
number of this work.

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Some time previously to the period of which I have now been speaking, I
met with an account of some researches on the action of Light, by Wedgwood
and Sir H. Davy, which, until then, I had never heard of. Their short
memoir on this subject was published in 1802 in the first volume of the
Journal of the Royal Institution. It is curious and interesting, and
certainly establishes their claim as the first inventors of the
Photographic Art, though the actual progress they made in it was small.
They succeeded, indeed, in obtaining impressions from solar light of flat
objects laid upon a sheet of prepared paper, but they say that they found
it impossible to fix or preserve those pictures: all their numerous
attempts to do so having failed.

And with respect to the principal branch of the Art, viz. the taking
pictures of distant objects with a Camera Obscura, they attempted to do
so, but obtained no result at all, however long the experiment lasted.
While therefore due praise should be awarded to them for making the
attempt, they have no claim to the actual discovery of any process by
which such a picture can really be obtained.

It is remarkable that the failure in this respect appeared so complete,
that the subject was soon after abandoned both by themselves and others,
and as far as we can find, it was never resumed again. The thing fell
into entire oblivion for more than thirty years: and therefore, though the
Daguerreotype was not so entirely new a conception as M. Daguerre and the
French Institute imagined, and though my own labours had been still more
directly anticipated by Wedgwood, yet the improvements were so great in
all respects, that I think the year 1839 may fairly be considered as the
real date of birth of the Photographic Art, that is to say, its first
public disclosure to the world.

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There is a point to which I wish to advert, which respects the execution
of the following specimens. As far as respects the design, the copies are
almost facsimiles of each other, but there is some variety in the tint
which they present. This arises from a twofold cause. In the first place,
each picture is separately formed by the light of the sun, and