Form is henceforth divorced from matter. In fact, matter as a visible
object is of no great use any longer, except as the mould on which form
is shaped. Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing, taken from
different points of view, and that is all we want of it. Pull it down or
burn it up, if you please. We must, perhaps, sacrifice some luxury in
the loss of color; but form and light and shade are the great things,
and even color can be added, and perhaps by and by may be got direct
from Nature.
There is only one Coliseum or Pantheon; but how many millions of
potential negatives have they shed,—representatives of billions of
pictures,—since they were erected! Matter in large masses must always be
fixed and dear; form is cheap and transportable. We have got the fruit
of creation now, and need not trouble ourselves with the core. Every
conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for
us. Men will hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they hunt
the cattle in South America, for their skins, and leave the carcasses as
of little worth.
The consequence of this will soon be such an enormous collection of
forms that they will have to be classified and arranged in vast
libraries, as books are now. The time will come when a man who wishes to
see any object, natural or artificial, will go to the Imperial,
National, or City Stereographic Library and call for its skin or form,
as he would for a book at any common library. We do now distinctly
propose the creation of a comprehensive and systematic stereographic
library, where all men can find the special forms they particularly
desire to see as artists, or as scholars, or as mechanics, or in any
other capacity.
Again, we must have special stereographic collections, just as we have
professional and other special libraries. And as a means of facilitating
the formation of public and private stereographic collections, there
must be arranged a comprehensive system of exchanges, so that there may
grow up something like a universal currency of these bank-notes, or
promises to pay in solid substance, which the sun has engraved for the
great Bank of Nature.
The next European war will send us stereographs of battles. It is
asserted that a bursting shell can be photographed. The time is perhaps
at hand when a flash of light, as sudden and brief as that of the
lightning which shows a whirling wheel standing stock still, shall
preserve the very instant of the shock of contact of the mighty armies
that are even now gathering. The lightning from heaven does actually
photograph natural objects on the bodies of those it has just
blasted,—so we are told by many witnesses. The lightning of clashing
sabres and bayonets may be forced to stereotype itself in a stillness as
complete as that of the tumbling tide of Niagara as we see it
self-pictured.
We should be led on too far, if we developed our belief as to the
transformations to be wrought by this greatest of human triumph over
earthly conditions, the divorce of form and substance. Let our readers
fill out a blank check on the future as they like,—we give our
indorsement to their imaginations beforehand. We are looking into
stereoscopes as pretty toys, and wondering over the photograph as a
charming novelty; but before another generation has passed away, it will
be recognized that a new epoch in the history of human progress dates
from the time when He who
never but in uncreated light
Dwelt from eternity—
took a pencil of fire from the hand of the "angel standing in the sun," and placed it in the hands of a mortal.
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