d to be attained justifies the means, we
are willing to believe; but the sight of these pictures is a commentary on
civilization such as a savage might well triumph to show its missionaries.
Yet through such martyrdom must come our redemption. War Is the surgery of
crime. Bad as it is in itself, it always implies that something worse has
gone before. Where is the American, worthy of his privileges, who does not
now recognize the fact, if never until now, that the disease of our nation
was organic, not functional, calling for the knife, and not for washes and
anodynes?

It is a relief to soar away from the contemplation of these sad scenes and
fly in the balloon which carried Messrs. King and Black in their aerial
photographic excursion. Our townsman, Dr. John Jeffries, as is well
recollected, was one of the first to tempt the perilous heights of the
atmosphere, and the first who ever performed a journey through the air of
any considerable extent. We believe this attempt of our younger townsmen
to be the earliest in which the aeronaut has sought to work the two
miracles at once, of rising against the force of gravity, and picturing
the face of the earth beneath him without brush or pencil.

One of their photographs is lying before us. Boston, as the eagle and the
wild goose see it, is a very different object from the same place as the
solid citizen looks up at its eaves and chimneys. The Old South and
Trinity Church are two landmarks not to be mistaken. Washington Street
slants across the picture as a narrow cleft. Milk Street winds as if the
cowpath which gave it a name had been followed by the builders of its
commercial palaces. Windows, chimneys, and skylights attract the eye in
the central parts of the view, exquisitely defined, bewildering in
numbers. Towards the circumference it grows darker, becoming clouded and
confused, and at one end a black expanse of waveless water is whitened by
the nebulous outline of flitting sails. As a first attempt it is on the
whole a remarkable success; but its greatest interest is in showing what
we may hope to see accomplished in the same direction.

While the aeronaut is looking at our planet from the vault of heaven where
he hangs suspended, and seizing the image of the scene beneath him as he
flies, the astronomer is causing the heavenly bodies to print their images
on the sensitive sheet he spreads under the rays concentrated by his
telescope. We have formerly taken occasion to