TALBOT6867

Sir J Herschel

Greta Bank, Keswick
Cumberland
Nov. 13. 53

Dear Sir,

I am sorry that my absence from home prevented my sooner receiving and answering your kind letter. I have the greatest pleasure in consenting to your and D^r Bowring’s ¹ request respecting the engraving of your portrait taken by my photographic process.²

It is true, as you say, that these portraits are a lottery, but let a person devote two hours to this object, in that time his portrait can easily be taken twenty times in various lights and aspects then let his friends examine all the results, select the most successful one and burn the remainder. Fortune must be cruel if one of the number does not prove satisfactory. And there is a good deal of lottery in ordinary portrait painting the likeness is so very often a failure.

Will you in return allow me to ask you, in case it should ever be necessary (which I hope it will not) for me to take legal proceedings against persons piratically infringing the patent, and it should come to a trial in a court of law, whether it would be very inconvenient to you to give evidence on that occasion, that is, your opinion & belief as to the merit & originality of the invention? My reason for troubling you is the great weight which I know would be attached by the judge & jury to your opinion.

I see that Hind ³ has just announced the 27^th of that wonderful group of planets which circulate between Mars and Jupiter. His activity as an observer is wonderful.

I think a few monster telescopes judiciously distributed over the fine climates of the South and especially on the summits of high mountains where the air is so pure that Jupiter’s satellites can be seen with the naked eye, would in a few years, if directed by such men as Hind, entirely change the face of astronomy, and give us an approximation to the true distances of all the principal stars –

Believe me to remain Yours ever truly
H. F. Talbot