116
NOTES AND QUERIES. [9> s. v. FEB. 10, 1900.
" could " instead of "should," and it is this :
'The Deserted Village' was published in
1770, and Goldsmith died in 1774, and owing
to the kindness of Mr. Pickering, our librarian,
who has caused the first edition and all other
editions in the British Museum published
between those dates to be examined, I learn
that " could " is used in all of them. How the
editor of the edition of 1822, which contains
' Critical Observations,' and is an excellent
little edition, came to substitute "should"
for " could " is a puzzle to me. However, I,
who came forth as a corrector, am myself
corrected, and I consequently write this sitting
in ashes and clothed in sackcloth.
H. B. P. Inner Temple.
THE LATE MR. BERNARD QUARITCH (9 th S. v 83). I was once a neighbour of the late Mr. Quaritch, the great book-dealer. I resided in the house adjoining his in Piccadilly. Having more books than I could carry about with me, being migratory at that time, I put out a hundred volumes on a table, and asked him to look at them and see if they were worth his buying. His quick eye lighted on a thin, gold-lettered quarto volume of Kant, worth two guineas, and he said he would give thirty shillings for the lot, which I accepted. One thing he said I well remember. Looking around at other books on shelves, he remarked, " You will do well to sell all you do not daily need. A poor book-lover regards his books as children. He is loth to part with them, and is unablej'to keep them. They only encumber him, and he can do better without them " which may be true of children when they, are many and the income limited.
GEORGE JACOB HOLYOAKE.
THE DISCOVERER OF PHOTOGRAPHY (9 th S. v. 26). I fail to see where Lord Brougham's claims would come in. The actual inventors of photography, as a useful art, were Niepce and Daguerre, Frenchmen, who began their experiments, separately, about 1814. All the same, Thomas Wedgwood (son of the potter) and Sir Humphry Davy were universally acknowledged long before Miss Meteyard published her * Records of the Younger Wedgwoods, embracing the History of the Discovery of Photography' as the first to discover the art of taking sun pictures. It was made known by them in a paper pub- lished June, 1 802, in the Journal of the Royal Institution, 'An Account of a Method of copying Paintings upon Glass, and of making Profiles by the Agency of Light upon Nitrate of Silver ; with Observations by Sir Humphry Davy.' Wedgwood tried in vain to "fix the
copies, and the discovery, which attracted
ittle notice, was soon forgotten.
In November, 1863, at a meeting of the London Photographic Society at King's College, a marvellous find was announced, which seemed to award the palm to Matthew Boulton, the partner of Watt. The library at Soho (Birmingham) had been undisturbed during half a century, when, in the course of clearing out a vast collection of old docu- ments, a number of crumpled and folded sheets of paper were discovered. When smoothed out they were found to consist of copies, on coarse foolscap, of designs by Angelica Kauffman, not done by hand, but by some secret process. More pictures, and one or two silvered plates, were found in a broker's shop, among waste paper sold from Soho. A camera was found in the library there. All seemed to prove that the pictures were photographs ; and as the elder Wedg- wood was a member of a scientific society which met at Soho, it was plain that Thomas, the son, had derived his knowledge of photo- graphy from what had been picked up at Soho.
However, after patient investigation, the paper pictures found at Soho (which had, it is said, so much alarmed Sir William Beechey that he got up a petition praying that the manufacture might be stopped, as it fore- shadowed the ruin of the artistic profession) were found to have been executed by a mechanical method, did not contain nitrate of silver, and had no claims to be called photographs. The camera and silvered copper- plates found belonged to a Miss Wilkinson, who had used the library at Soho as a photo- graphic studio subsequently to the discoveries of Daguerre and Nie'pce. ' See Tomlinson's 'Encyclopaedia of Useful Arts,' 1866, art. 'Photography.' HERBERT B. CLAYTON.
COL. MALET is evidently wrong in saying Miss Meteyard names Tom Brierly (?) as the inventor of photography. Thomas Wedg- wood, the youngest son of Josiah, the greatest English potter, was the inventor, and a full account of the discovery may be found in Miss Meteyard's 'A Group of Englishmen,' pp. 154 et seq., and a facsimile of the first photograph seen. This was taken by Thomas Wedgwood in 1791-93. Byerley was not an inventive genius, and I may take this oppor- tunity of correcting a mistake which I believe appeared in a past number of ' N. & Q.,' and to which I omitted to reply at the time, namely, that the silvered ware was invented also by Thomas Wedgwood, and not Thos. Byerley. See Miss Meteyard's ' Life of Josiah
