ief
outline of photographic history will show a parallel to the permutative
impulse so conspicuous in the progress of electricity. At the points
where the electrician and the photographer collaborate we shall note
achievements such as only the loftiest primal powers may evoke.

A brief story of what electricity and its necessary precursor, fire,
have done and promise to do for civilization, may have attraction in
itself; so, also, may a review, though most cursory, of the work of the
camera and all that led up to it: for the provinces here are as wide as
art and science, and their bounds comprehend well-nigh the entirety of
human exploits. And between the lines of this story we may read
another--one which may tell us something of the earliest stumblings in
the dawn of human faculty. When we compare man and his next of kin, we
find between the two a great gulf, surely the widest betwixt any allied
families in nature. Can a being of intellect, conscience, and aspiration
have sprung at any time, however remote, from the same stock as the
orang and the chimpanzee? Since 1859, when Darwin published his "Origin
of Species," the theory of evolution has become so generally accepted
that to-day it is little more assailed than the doctrine of gravitation.
And yet, while the average man of intelligence bows to the formula that
all which now exists has come from the simplest conceivable state of
things,--a universal nebula, if you will,--in his secret soul he makes
one exception--himself. That there is a great deal more assent than
conviction in the world is a chiding which may come as justly from the
teacher's table as from the preacher's pulpit. Now, if we but catch the
meaning of man's mastery of electricity, we shall have light upon his
earlier steps as a fire-kindler, and as a graver of pictures and symbols
on bone and rock. As we thus recede from civilization to primeval
savagery, the process of the making of man may become so clear that the
arguments of Darwin shall be received with conviction, and not with
silent repulse.

As we proceed to recall, one by one, the salient chapters in the history
of fire, and of the arts of depiction that foreran the camera, we shall
perceive a truth of high significance. We shall see that, while every
new faculty has its roots deep in older powers, and while its growth may
have been going on for age after age, yet its flowering may be as the
event of a morning. Even as our gardens show us t