Allow me to take this opportunity of thanking Archdeacon Cotton for his very valuable communication. I trust that he and others of your many learned readers will lend a helping hand to the correction of this list, and its ultimate completion; the notice of the editions of 1551 and 1617 (Vol. vii., p. 18.) is as interesting as it is important. It will be perceived that editions of the Prayer-Book referred to in former lists are not enumerated in the present one.
W. Sparrow Simpson, B.A.
PHOTOGRAPHIC NOTES AND QUERIES.
Originator of the Collodion Process.—All those who take any interest in photography must agree with your correspondent G. C. that M. Le Gray is a talented man, and has done much for photography. G. C. has given a very good translation of M. Le Gray's last published work, p. 89., which work I have: but I must take leave to observe, that it is no contradiction whatever to my statement. The translations to which M. Le Gray alludes, of 1850, appeared in Willat's publication, from which I gave him the credit of having first suggested the use of collodion in photography. The subject is there dismissed in three or four lines.
M. Le Gray gave no directions whatever for its application to glass in his work published in July 1851, wherein he alludes to it only as an "encallage" for paper, classing it with amidou, the resins, &c., which he recommends in a similar manner.
I had, four months previous to this, published the process in detail in the Chemist. I never asserted that he had not tried experiments with collodion in 1849; but he did not give the public the advantage of following him: and I again repeat that the first time M. Le Gray published the collodion process was in September, 1852,—a year and a half after my publication, and when it had become much used.
It is obvious that if M. Le Gray had been in possession of any detailed process with collodion on glass in 1850, he would not have omitted to publish it in his work dated July, 1851.
F. Scott Archer.
105. Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury.