Photography, therefore, cannot even approximate to perfection till the artist works with a camera furnished with a single quarter of an inch lens of rock crystal, having its radii of curvature as six to one, or what experience may find better, with an achromatic lens of the same aperture. And we may state with equal confidence, that the photographer who has the sagacity to perceive the defects of his instruments, the honesty to avow it, and the skill to remedy them by the applications of modern science, will take a place as high in photographic portraiture as a Reynolds or a Lawrence in the sister art. Such being the nature of single portraits, we may form some notion of the effect produced by combining dissimilar ones in the stereoscope, so as to represent the original in relief. The single pictures themselves, including binocular and multocular representations of the individual, must, when combined, exhibit a very imperfect portrait in relief,—so imperfect, indeed, that the artist is obliged to take his two pictures from points of sight different from the correct points, in order to produce the least disagreeable result. This will appear after we have explained the correct method of taking binocular portraits for the stereoscope. No person but a painter, or one who has the eye and the taste of a painter, is qualified to be a photographer either in single or binocular portraiture. The first step in taking a portrait or copying a statue, is to ascertain in what aspect and at what distance from the eye it ought to be taken.