older method had, however, the advantage of the other in that, by the very variety of the preparation to which the plate was subjected, its results were not so liable to present the appearance, either coarse or dull, of common hand-tinted work. Some of Leblond's engravings, particularly a large, half-length "Louis XV.," enable us to estimate to the full the capacities of his invention. Leblond, indeed, must be counted an inventor, inasmuch as it was his to discover a secret which, before him, had been only dimly foreseen, or at most half-guessed. Still, the essays in the first years of the seventeenth century of the Dutchman Lastmann, and a little later of Seghers the Fleming, should not be completely overlooked; nor would it be just to refuse recognition to the practical improvements made in colour engraving, after Leblond, by Gautier Dagoty, in Paris, and by Taylor, in London. In proportion to the relative importance of the two discoveries, Leblond played the same part in the history of the colour process as Daguerre in the history of heliography. They each effected so great an advance as to close the period of groping and darkness, and to some extent determine the course of progress. But it does not follow, therefore, that they owed nothing to the attempts of their predecessors; and if their claim to inventors' honours is fairly established, it is because they solved a problem they were by no means the first to attack. Leblond, indeed, got nothing from his discovery but the honour of making it. He sought in vain to turn it to account in London, and succeeded no better in Paris. In the latter city he lived for some years in great distress, and in 1741 he died there, in the hospital. Some years after the invention of colour engraving, another sort of engraving, or rather another sort of pictorial reproduction, the method called "au lavis," was invented, and very skilfully used from the outset, by Jean Baptiste Leprince; and in no great while the series of innovations in the practice of the art, from the end of the seventeenth century, was completed by the invention of aquatint. The first of these two processes is apparently of extreme simplicity. The line once engraved and bitten in, as in ordinary etching, it only consisted in brushing the plate with acid, as a draughtsman washes in on paper with sepia or Indian ink. The preliminary work, however, required a great deal of care and skill, and even a certain amount of scientific knowledge. The particular quality of the copper, the composition of the varnishes and acids, and many other conditions impossible to discuss in detail, made the new process somewhat difficult of employment; and before long the ardour of those practitioners who had essayed to imitate Leprince's results was very sensibly diminished.