rrency of these bank-notes, or
promises to pay in solid substance, which the sun has engraved for the
great Bank of Nature.

To render comparison of similar objects, or of any that we may wish to
see side by side, easy, there should be a stereographic _metre_ or
fixed standard of focal length for the camera lens, to furnish by its
multiples or fractions, if necessary, the scale of distances, and the
standard of power in the stereoscope-lens. In this way the eye can
make the most rapid and exact comparisons. If the "great elm" and the
Cowthorpe oak, if the State-House and St. Peter's, were taken on the
same scale, and looked at with the same magnifying power, we should
compare them without the possibility of being misled by those
partialities which might tend to make us overrate the indigenous
vegetable and the dome of our native Michel Angelo.

The next European war will send us stereographs of battles. It is
asserted that a bursting shell can be photographed. The time is perhaps
at hand when a flash of light, as sudden and brief as that of the
lightning which shows a whirling wheel standing stock still, shall
preserve the very instant of the shock of contact of the mighty armies
that are even now gathering. The lightning from heaven does actually
photograph natural objects on the bodies of those it has just
blasted,--so we are told by many witnesses. The lightning of clashing
sabres and bayonets may be forced to stereotype itself in a stillness
as complete as that of the tumbling tide of Niagara as we see it
self-pictured.

We should be led on too far, if we developed our belief as to the
transformations to be wrought by this greatest of human triumphs over
earthly conditions, the divorce of form and substance. Let our readers
fill out a blank check on the future as they like,--we give our
indorsement to their imaginations beforehand. We are looking into
stereoscopes as pretty toys, and wondering over the photograph as a
charming novelty; but before another generation has passed away, it will
be recognized that a new epoch in the history of human progress dates
from the time when He who

----never but in uncreated light
Dwelt from eternity--

took a pencil of fire from the hand of the "angel standing in the sun,"
and placed it in the hands of a mortal.

THE MINISTER'S WOOING.

[Continued.]

CHAPTER XIV.

At the period of which we are speaking, no name in the New Republic was
associated with