The arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture have in every age, and in every region of civilisation, called into exercise the loftiest genius and the deepest reason of man. Consecrated by piety, and hallowed by affection, the choicest productions of the pencil and the chisel have been preserved by the liberality of individuals and the munificence of princes, while the palaces of sovereigns, the edifices of social life, the temples of religion, the watch-towers of war, the obelisks of fame, and the mausolea of domestic grief, stand under the azure cupola of heaven, to attest by their living beauty, or their ruined grandeur, the genius and liberality which gave them birth. To the cultivation and patronage of such noble arts, the vanity, the hopes, and the holiest affections of man stand irrevocably pledged; and we should deplore any invention or discovery, or any tide in the nation’s taste, which should paralyse the artist’s pencil, or break the sculptor’s chisel, or divert into new channels the genius which wields them. But instead of superseding the arts of design, photography will but supply them with new materials,—with collections of costume,—with studies of drapery and of forms, and with scenes in life, and facts in nature, which, if they possess at all, they possess imperfectly, and without which art must be stationary, if she does not languish and decline. Sentiments analogous to these have been more professionally expressed by M. Delaroche, a distinguished French artist,—by Sir Charles Eastlake, whose taste and knowledge of art is unrivalled,—and by Mr. Ruskin, who has already given laws to art, and whose genius is destined to elevate and to reform it. M. Delaroche considers photography “as carrying to such perfection certain of the essential principles of art, that they must become subjects of study and observation, even to the most accomplished artist.”... “The finish of inconceivable minuteness,” he says, “disturbs in no respect the repose of the masses, nor impairs in any way the general effect.... The correctness of the lines, the precision of the forms in the designs of M. Daguerre, are as perfect as it is possible they can be, and yet, at the same time, we discover in them a broad and energetic manner, and a whole equally rich in hue and in effect. The painter will obtain by this process a quick method of making collections of studies, which he could not otherwise procure without much time and labour, and in a style very far inferior, whatever might be his talents in other respects.” In the same spirit, Mr. Ruskin[58] considers “the art of photography as enabling us to obtain as many memoranda of the facts of nature as we need;” and long before Mr. Talbot taught us to fix upon paper the pictures of the camera obscura, the Rev. John Thomson, one of the most distinguished of our Scottish landscape painters, studied, in one of these instruments, the forms and colours of the scenes which he was to represent. Other