Colour, natural colour too, has been very decidedly secured. The sun has been solicited to display his palette, and the answer has been a picture in which colour for colour in all their fidelity have been impressed. The plate upon which this result has been obtained is of a dark brown colour, and the chromatic variety is, as it were, eaten out by the solar rays. These colours have not yet been permanently fixed upon the plate employed, but from the temporary degree of fixedness which has been obtained, we may fairly hope that in a short time colour may be rendered as permanent on the productions of the photographer as on those of the painter. It is a curious and striking fact, that in the preparation of these plates, salts are used which give colours to flame; and according to the colour which is produced by them when burning, so, on the photographic plate, is that colour impressed with greater intensity than the others. To what is this leading us? Mysteries surround our advances on the domain of truth. We dare not speculate upon them: the time of their full development will arrive. By the aid of this beautiful art, we are enabled to preserve the lineaments of those who have benefited their race by their intellect, or their heroism. We can hand down to future ages portraits of our own Wellington, and the illustrious Arago, unerring in their truthfulness. How great would be the joy of all, could we now obtain a daguerreotype portrait of a Greek poet, or of a Roman philosopher, of a Sophocles, or of a Seneca! How much discussion would be prevented did we possess a calotype portrait of the Bard of Avon, or of the Philosopher of Grantham! By the agency of those very rays which give life and brilliancy to the laughing eye and the roseate cheek, we can at once correctly trace the outline of the features we admire, with all those shadowy details which give a reality to the “presentment.” The objects of our love may be for ever present with us in these self-painted pictures. The vicious, whom we would avoid, may be made known to us by this unerring painter. The process which nature employs is perfect; the imperfections are those of man, and these being few, he may soon learn to remedy. To the traveller, how valuable are the processes of photography! He secures representations of those remains of temples which were in their glory when Moses wrote. He copies by one operation a tomb at Karnac, covered with myriads of hieroglyphics, or an inscribed stone in Arabia, which it would occupy him days to trace. These he can carry to his home and read at his leisure. The relics of hoar antiquity speaking to the present of the past, and recording the histories of races which have fleeted away like shadows, are thus preserved to tell their wondrous tales.