Page:A thousand years hence. Being personal experiences (IA thousandyearshen00gree).djvu/296

 of buying up all this surplusage, became by degrees possessed, amongst them, of a more or less complete history and physical geography of the earth's past. In fact, between the many of these dealers in the past, every day, hour, even minute, aye, and at times even successions of seconds, might be pieced together backwards out of all their arrears of records. And when these records consisted, as they did for a long time at first, of actual photographic paper, however thin the material, even to the metalloid preparation compressed to the hundred-millionth of a millimetre, the piles of such stock were, nevertheless, inconveniently bulky upon our crowded surface. But after that great discovery, through the medium of colour-sound (pressing necessity being, in every age, the mother of invention), by which we could transfer and store up the mode of that sound, so as to reproduce and retransfer at pleasure all the photographic hues and aspects, the whole case and in fact the whole business modes of the case, were fundamentally altered, and all its old accumulating difficulties dispersed.

A very good illustration of the ways and the means, in this now huge business development, is supplied by a case of my own, happening only the other day. A very distinct record had somehow come down to us, from as far back as just a thousand years ago, of a picnic, one Easter holiday time, at Brighton, the once-famous watering-place of those old days, in which my great ancestor, so often alluded to in this work, figured with all his family. This subject happening to turn up during the evening's leisure in our family circle, a wish was expressed all round to institute a fishing for this very picnic scene. My