TALBOT8661

[printed notepaper:]
1 Hillside Crescent, Edinburgh

Monday

Dear Sir

Herewith I beg to send you two dreadfully coarse Teneriffe photographs. They represent the peak of M^t. Guajara, & are both from the same negative; & that one the same which you put on the big copperplate. ¹

The magnifying = 8·5 diameters & is far beyond what the original will bear, to be looked at with anything but the naked eye; but then that amount of magnifying has brought out [illegible deletion] to view the grains of silver forming the shades of the original, and that has made me think, though knowing next to nothing of your photoglyphic process, that you might use these grains at once, instead of an aquatint ground, & might by their means, bite in the plate to an unusual depth, so as to make a forcible print. Otherwise I should have had to apologize to you for asking you to accept two such sadly [illegible deletion] definition-less photographs.

Don't give yourself the trouble of answering this, if you please, except by the return, at your leisure, of the empty box.

Yours very truly
C. Piazzi Smyth

[envelope, imprinted on recto "Royal Observatory, Edinburgh":]
H. Fox Talbot Esq^re F.R.S.
&c &c &c
11 G^t. Stuart Street