The number of amateur artists in photography is continually increasing.
The interest we ourselves have taken in some results of photographic art
has brought us under a weight of obligation to many of them which we can
hardly expect to discharge. Some of the friends in our immediate
neighborhood have sent us photographs of their own making which for
clearness and purity of tone compare favorably with the best professional
work. Among our more distant correspondents there are two so widely known
to photographers that we need not hesitate to name them: Mr. Coleman
Sellers of Philadelphia and Mr. S. Wager Hull of New York. Many beautiful
specimens of photographic art have been sent us by these gentlemen,--among
others, some exquisite views of Sunnyside and of the scene of Ichabod
Crane's adventures. Mr. Hull has also furnished us with a full account of
the dry process, as followed by him, and from which he brings out results
hardly surpassed by any method.

A photographic intimacy between two persons who never saw each other's
faces (that is, in Nature's original positive, the principal use of which,
after all, is to furnish negatives from which portraits may be taken) is a
new form of friendship. After an introduction by means of a few views of
scenery or other impersonal objects, with a letter or two of explanation,
the artist sends his own presentment, not in the stiff shape of a
purchased _carte de visite_, but as seen in his own study or parlor,
surrounded by the domestic accidents which so add to the individuality of
the student or the artist. You see him at his desk or table with his books
and stereoscopes round him; you notice the lamp by which he reads,--the
objects lying about; you guess his condition, whether married or single;
you divine his tastes, apart from that which he has in common with
yourself. By-and-by, as he warms towards you, he sends you the picture of
what lies next to his heart,--a lovely boy, for instance, such as laughs
upon us in the delicious portrait on which we are now looking, or an old