Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/783

Rh would need to have witnessed Daguerre's discovery, and Arago's report upon it in the Chamber of Deputies, to realize the enthusiasm with which it filled the world. Daguerre's particular process, of only limited application, was soon cast in the shade by one which in its essentials is still in use. But it deserves, perhaps, to be remembered that when the first still imperfect Talbotype process reached us from England nobody foresaw its immense future, and the substitution for the silver plate of paper impregnated with a salt of silver was received with shaking of heads, and was looked upon as a step backward.

Thus photography started upon its wonderful career of victory. It soon assumed the relation to art that Arago had promised for it. Not only has it lightened the work of the architectural, interior, and landscape painter, and made the camera lucida superfluous even for panoramas; it has also furnished many useful hints relative to light and shadow, reflection and half-tone, and especially as to the way to give the most natural appearance of bodily projection to figures on a flat. It might be profitable, for the sake of forming a judgment in both directions, to inquire what part photography has had in the origin of the newer schools of painting, of the mannerism of the impressionists, and of the clear-light and free-light painters. It has taught the landscape painter how to reproduce rocks with geological and vegetation with botanical correctness, and to represent glaciers, which was rarely attempted before, and never successfully. It fixed the image of the clouds, although its. pictures of the sky were somewhat defective. Finally, it helped the portrait painter without exciting his envy, for, while it caught up only a single often long-while tense expression, it was not adequate to give an average picture of the man, and the unpleasant, stiff photograph was almost proverbially a bad portrait. It furnished painters, however, in many instances with an invaluable groundwork, although it had to be enlivened by the artistic touch. But the newer form of portrait photography is calculated to attract the attention of the artist in many points. Instantaneous photography catches the expression of the countenance and the attitudes during so short an interval that it makes good what escapes in the average expression, and thus leads to most valuable observations. Duchenne and Darwin recreated the doctrine of expression in emotion; the former by counterfeiting the various expressions by means of electrical stimulation of the muscles of the face, and the latter by following their phylogenetic development through the series of animals. Both presented the artist with photographic images of such expressions by the side of which