John Spencer, had joined the firm, and at the end of that year Messrs. Spencer, Sawyer, Bird and Co. purchased the Autotype patents, plant, and stock at Ealing Dene, and all its interest in the wholesale trade; and, in 1874, they bought up the whole of the Fine Art business, including the stock in Rathbone Place, and became the Autotype Company. The great photographic feature of this year was the Convention held on August 19th in St. James's Hall, Regent Street, London, in celebration of the jubilee of practical photography, which was inaugurated by the delivery of an address by the president, Mr. Andrew Pringle. The address was a fairly good résumé of all that had been done for the advancement of photography during the past fifty years. The exhibition of photographs was somewhat of a failure; little was shown that possessed any historical interest, and that little was contributed by myself. There was a considerable display of apparatus of almost every description, but there was nothing that had not been seen, or could have been seen, in the shops of the exhibitors. The papers that were read were of considerable interest, and imparted no small amount of information, especially Mr. Thos. R. Dallmeyer's on "False Rendering of Photographic Images by the Misapplication of Lenses"; Mr. C. H. Bothamley's on "Orthochromatic Photography with Gelatine Plates"; Mr. Thomas Bolas's on "The Photo-mechanical Printing Methods as employed in the Jubilee Year of Photography"; but by far the most popular, wonderful, and instructive, was Professor E. Muybridge's lecture, with illustrations, on "The Movements of Animals." The sight of the formidable batteries of lenses was startling enough, but when the actions of the horse, and other animals, were shown in the "Zoopraxiscope," the effect on the sense of sight was both astounding and convincing, and I began to marvel how artists could have lived and laboured in the wrong direction for so many years, especially when the lecturer showed that a prehistoric artist had scratched on a bone a rude but truthful representation of an animal in motion. Both the sight and intelligence of that prehistoric artist must have been keener than the senses of animal painters of the nineteenth century.