Another great achievement of this period is the beautiful art of Photography. Some slight approach towards this mode of producing pictures was made as long ago as the sixteenth century, when the action of light on [Illustration: BURLEIGH HOUSE, STAMFORD.] chloride of silver was discovered. Further results were obtained during the eighteenth century, particularly by Thomas Wedgwood (son of the celebrated potter) and Sir Humphry Davy. Wedgwood was the author of a paper, published in 1802 in the Journal of the Royal Institution, which he entitled “An Account of a Method of Copying Paintings upon Glass, and of making Profiles by the Agency of Light upon Nitrate of Silver.” The art, however, made no great progress until it was taken up in France by M. Daguerre, who worked in concert with M. Joseph Nicéphore Niepce. The latter died in 1833, after several years’ association with M. Daguerre; but it was not until January, 1839, that the production of photographic plates was publicly announced by his partner. In the same year, Mr. Henry Fox Talbot published his mode of multiplying photographic impressions by producing in the first instance a negative photograph, from which any number of positive copies could be obtained. The earliest photographs were called Daguerreotypes and Talbotypes, after the French and English inventors; but in a few years both appellations were superseded by the Greek word _photography_--literally, a “light-writing,” though a “light-picture” would be the more proper description. The uses of photography have been manifold, and the satisfaction they have given in preserving the very reflex of the faces of our dead relations and cherished friends is doubtless the greatest triumph of all. Within a few months of his death, Prince Albert was deeply moved on receiving from his daughter, the Crown Princess of Prussia, a daguerreotype of his father. “How precious,” he writes to her on the 3rd of September, 1861, “is the daguerreotype! After seventeen years which have glided by since my dear father was taken away, all at once his shade has come before me--for such, in fact, it is.”[17]