chord of happy recollections. Photography is now the historian of earth and animated nature, the biographer of man, the registrar of his growth from childhood to "man's estate," the delineator of his physical, moral, and social progress, the book of fashion, and the mirror of the times. The uses and applications of photography are almost indescribable; scarcely an art, or a science, or a trade or profession that does not enlist photography into its service. Photography does not merely pander to the gratification of earthly vanity, but is an alleviator of human misery. Photography enters our hospitals and registers faithfully the progress of disease, its growth and change from day to day, until it is cured, or ripe for the knife of the surgeon; its pictures are lessons to the professor, and a book of study for the students, charts for their guidance through the painful and tedious cases of others similarly afflicted, teaching them what to do and what to avoid, to relieve the suffering of other patients. Photography is dragged into our criminal law courts, and sits on the right hand of Justice, giving evidence of the most undeniable character, without being under oath, and free from the suspicion of perjury, convicting murderers and felons, and acquitting the innocent without prejudice; and in our courts of equity, cases are frequently decided by the truth-telling evidence of photography. Astronomers, geographers, and electricians freely acknowledge how much they are indebted to photography in making their celestial and terrestrial observations. Engineers, civil and military, employ photography largely in their plans and studies. Art, also, has recourse to photography, and is the only one of the liberal professions that is half ashamed to admit the aid it gains from the camera. If art admits it at all, it is done grudgingly, apologetically, and thanklessly. But there it is the old, old story of family quarrels and family jealousies. Old art might be likened to an old aunt that has grown withered and wrinkled, and peevish with disappointment, who, in spite of all her long-studied rules and principles of light and shade, harmony of colour, painting, "glazing," and "scumbling," has failed to win the first prize--that prize which a woman's ambition pants after from the moment she enters her teens until her dream is realized--that living model, moulded after God's own image, which, not having won in her mature age, she becomes jealous of the growing graces, the fresh and rollicking charms, the unstudied and ingenuous truthfulness of form exhibited by her niece. Old Art the aunt, Photography the niece. Readers, draw the moral for yourselves. I have digressed, but could not help it. Photography is so young and lovely, so bewitchingly beautiful in all her moods, so fascinating and enslaving--and she has enslaved thousands since she first sprung from the source that gives her life. But to return to my theme.