As though we were not already sufficiently depressed by the suspicion that we are becoming narrow-minded clods, plowing the tiny fields of our specialities in ever-tightening vortices, Mr. Larry Schaaf has now compounded our problem by giving us a book about two nineteenth-century philosopher-scientists who thought it perfectly natural to assume that they should understand everything.

The nominal center line of Mr. Schaaf’s good book is the occasional and tentative collaboration of William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-77) and John Herschel (1792-1871) in the invention of one of the several early systems of photography. Its true center line is perhaps the character of the scientific enterprise in a place as odd and creative as Britain when Queen Victoria was twenty.

Those who have managed never to confront even the barest outline of the history of photography will have to be told that Talbot was perhaps the most important of the handful of men who invented more-or-less satisfactory versions of photography in the years around 1839, when the version devised by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre was announced to the world. In retrospect we regard Talbot’s method as the foundation of modern photography, since it produced a negative (a picture in which the tonal values were reversed), which could in turn be used as a matrix, or a filter, from which any number of positive prints could be produced. The daguerreotype on the other hand was a unique object, like a Polaroid snapshot, and like the Polaroid it was best