uld
probably have vindicated his claim to his title by an explosion that
would have astonished the speaker.

This is just what the Daguerreotype has done. It has fixed the most
fleeting of our illusions, that which the apostle and the philosopher
and the poet have alike used as the type of instability and unreality.
The photograph has completed the triumph, by making a sheet of paper
reflect images like a mirror and hold them as a picture.

This triumph of human ingenuity is the most audacious, remote,
improbable, incredible,--the one that would seem least likely to be
regained, if all traces of it were lost, of all the discoveries man has
made. It has become such an everyday matter with us, that we forget its
miraculous nature, as we forget that of the sun itself, to which we owe
the creations of our new art. Yet in all the prophecies of dreaming
enthusiasts, in all the random guesses of the future conquests over
matter, we do not remember any prediction of such an inconceivable
wonder, as our neighbor round the corner, or the proprietor of the small
house on wheels, standing on the village common, will furnish any of us
for the most painfully slender remuneration. No Century of Inventions
includes this among its possibilities. Nothing but the vision of a
Laputan, who passed his days in extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers,
could have reached such a height of delirium as to rave about the time
when a man should paint his miniature by looking at a blank tablet, and
a multitudinous wilderness of forest foliage or an endless Babel of
roofs and spires stamp itself, in a moment, so faithfully and so
minutely, that one may creep over the surface of the picture with his
microscope and find every leaf perfect, or read the letters of distant
signs, and see what was the play at the "Varietes" or the "Victoria,"
on the evening of the day when it was taken, just as he would sweep the
real view with a spy-glass to explore all that it contains.

Some years ago, we sent a page or two to one of the magazines,--the
"Knickerbocker," if we remember aright,--in which the story was told
from the "Arabian Nights," of the three kings' sons, who each wished to
obtain the hand of a lovely princess, and received for answer, that he
who brought home the most wonderful object should obtain the lady's hand
as his reward. Our readers, doubtless, remember the original tale, with
the flying carpet, the tube which showed what a distant friend was
d