Every other primal gift of man rises to a new height at the bidding of the electrician. All the deftness and skill that have followed from the upright attitude, in its creation of the human hand, have been brought to a new edge and a broader range through electric art. Between the uses of flame and electricity have sprung up alliances which have created new wealth for the miner and the metal-worker, the manufacturer and the shipmaster, with new insights for the man of research. Articulate speech borne on electric waves makes itself heard half-way across America, and words reduced to the symbols of symbols--expressed in the perforations of a strip of paper--take flight through a telegraph wire at twenty-fold the pace of speech. Because the latest leap in knowledge and faculty has been won by the electrician, he has widened the scientific outlook vastly more than any explorer who went before. Beyond any predecessor, he began with a better equipment and a larger capital to prove the gainfulness which ever attends the exploiting a supreme agent of discovery. As we trace a few of the unending interlacements of electrical science and art with other sciences and arts, and study their mutually stimulating effects, we shall be reminded of a series of permutations where the latest of the factors, because latest, multiplies all prior factors in an unexampled degree.[5] We shall find reason to believe that this is not merely a suggestive analogy, but really true as a tendency, not only with regard to man's gains by the conquest of electricity, but also with respect to every other signal victory which has brought him to his present pinnacle of discernment and rule. If this permutative principle in former advances lay undetected, it stands forth clearly in that latest accession to skill and interpretation which has been ushered in by Franklin and Volta, Faraday and Henry. Although of much less moment than the triumphs of the electrician, the discovery of photography ranks second in importance among the scientific feats of the nineteenth century. The camera is an artificial eye with almost every power of the human retina, and with many that are denied to vision--however ingeniously fortified by the lens-maker. A brief outline of photographic history will show a parallel to the permutative impulse so conspicuous in the progress of electricity. At the points where the electrician and the photographer collaborate we shall note achievements such as only the loftiest primal powers may evoke.