I felt now that I was about to make a final test. It would be not only a test of my new plate, but of my own sanity, which I had at various times doubted. I felt, that, unless my idea should be proved true, I could no longer trust my reason, which had at every step beckoned me on to the next. I had studied medicine enough in my father's office long ago to know that either sanity or insanity may come as a reality from a mind's determined verdict on itself. When, therefore, I again sat down to analyze my daguerrotype of the planet, it was with the awe and fear which might beset one standing on a ledge between a frightful chasm and a transcendent height, and not knowing which was to receive him. From the first burst of the sunlight over the world, I sat at my task. Each instrument, each lens I used, I spent an hour or hours over, giving it the finest polish or nicety of adjustment to which it could be brought. Into that day I had distilled my past; into it I was willing to distil the eternity that was before me. With each now application, the field of the planet shrank a thousand leagues, but each time the light deepened. According to my principle, there was no doubt that some object would be revealed before the space became too limited, provided nothing interfered with the distinctness of the picture. At length I calculated that I was selecting about twenty square miles from about seven hundred. Forms were distinct, but they were rigid, and painfully reminded me of the astronomic maps. About five removes from this, I judged that the space I was looking at must be about ten feet square. I was sure that the objects really occupying those ten feet must be in my picture, if I could evoke them. On this I placed a mild power, and was startled at finding something new. The picture which had been so full of rigid and sharp outlines now became a confusion of ever-changing forms. Now it was light,--now shadow; angles faded into curves; but out of the swarming mass of shapes I could not, after hours of watching, obtain one that seemed like any form of life or art that I had ever seen. Had I, then, come to the end of my line? My eyes so pained me, and had been so tried, that I strove to persuade myself that the evanescent forms resulting from my unsatisfactory experiment must be optical illusions. I determined to let matters rest as they were until the next day, when my brain would be less heated and my eye calmer and steadier.