At present I know just a little about the art of photography, but I intend to make it my duty to learn a great deal more--enough to be able to sight a picture correctly; take and develop a dry plate, and afterwards fix a print; for I can perceive plainly that Time is coming on with rapid strides to the point when, along with his present utensils of colour-boxes and sketching block, the painter will require to carry his camera and stand, box of dry plates, and head covering. And how proper it is that it should be so, a little experience will prove to every one. An old castle or abbey, or the view of a town, or even the markings upon the trees, would take us days to outline--the buildings of the town, the fret-work about the abbey and castle, or the knots and gnarling of the woodland--and even then they would be incomplete. To illustrate my meaning, look at even the most careful outline pencil drawings of Turner, one of the most delicate of outline draughtsmen _when he liked_, or the scrupulous and untiring delicacy of his admirer, Professor John Ruskin, with his pencil, and compare those efforts with the lines about even the most commonplace photograph of a building or tree-trunk, and I need say no more on that point. The painter has lost the half, and distorted the rest; and although the drawing may appear more attractive at first sight, the photograph will be the better, for it embodies the first grand principle of a painter's training--faithful imitation of the object which he desires to represent. Photographers are apt to labour under the mistaken notion that we do not recognise this plain fact of artistic necessity; but we do, and if we have not the manliness to own it, that is our cowardice and not our blindness. Be content, therefore, when you go into exhibitions and see the misty result of your photographic studies in the realism of to-day hanging all round, that this is recognition enough of the obligations Palette owes to Camera. To consider the first of our united art aims--viz., '_The Exact Imitation of Nature_,' as she appears to us and as she appears to others. The eye is the organ to which we all appeal, and I do not know a more fickle umpire--except perhaps the ear.