iculties,
which, with increasing knowledge, will diminish and disappear. Its
progress will be more rapid when more minds are devoted to its
improvement, and when more of skilful manual assistance is employed in the
manipulation of its delicate processes; the paucity of which skilled
assistance at the present moment the Author finds one of the chief
difficulties in his way.

BRIEF HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE INVENTION OF THE ART

It may be proper to preface these specimens of a new Art by a brief
account of the circumstances which preceded and led to the discovery of
it. And these were nearly as follows.

One of the first days of the month of October 1833, I was amusing myself
on the lovely shores of the Lake of Como, in Italy, taking sketches with
Wollaston's Camera Lucida, or rather I should say, attempting to take
them: but with the smallest possible amount of success. For when the eye
was removed from the prism--in which all looked beautiful--I found that the
faithless pencil had only left traces on the paper melancholy to behold.

After various fruitless attempts, I laid aside the instrument and came to
the conclusion, that its use required a previous knowledge of drawing,
which unfortunately I did not possess.

I then thought of trying again a method which I had tried many years
before. This method was, to take a Camera Obscura, and to throw the image
of the objects on a piece of transparent tracing paper laid on a pane of
glass in the focus of the instrument. On this paper the objects are
distinctly seen, and can be traced on it with a pencil with some degree of
accuracy, though not without much time and trouble.

I had tried this simple method during former visits to Italy in 1823 and
1824, but found it in practice somewhat difficult to manage, because the
pressure of the hand and pencil upon the paper tends to shake and displace
the instrument (insecurely fixed, in all probability, while taking a hasty
sketch by a roadside, or out of an inn window); and if the instrument is
once deranged, it is most difficult to get it back again, so as to point
truly in its former direction.

Besides which, there is another objection, namely, that it baffles the
skill and patience of the amateur to trace all the minute details visible
on the paper; so that, in fact, he carries away with him little beyond a
mere souvenir of the scene--which, however, certainly has its value when
looked back to, in long after y