It is a relief to soar away from the contemplation of these sad scenes and fly in the balloon which carried Messrs. King and Black in their aerial photographic excursion.  Our townsman, Dr. John Jeffries, as is well recollected, was one of the first to tempt the perilous heights of the atmosphere, and the first who ever performed a journey through the air of any considerable extent.  We believe this attempt of our younger townsmen to be the earliest in which the aeronaut has sought to work the two miracles at once, of rising against the force of gravity, and picturing the face of the earth beneath him without brush or pencil.

One of their photographs is lying before us.  Boston, as the eagle and the wild goose see it, is a very different object from the same place as the solid citizen looks up at its eaves and chimneys.  The Old South and Trinity Church are two landmarks not to be mistaken.  Washington Street slants across the picture as a narrow cleft.  Milk Street winds as if the cowpath which gave it a name had been followed by the builders of its commercial palaces.  Windows, chimneys, and skylights attract the eye in the central parts of the view, exquisitely defined, bewildering in numbers.  Towards the circumference it grows darker, becoming clouded and confused, and at one end a black expanse of waveless water is whitened by the nebulous outline of flitting sails.  As a first attempt it is on the whole a remarkable success; but its greatest interest is in showing what we may hope to see accomplished in the same direction.

While the aeronaut is looking at our planet from the vault of heaven where he hangs suspended, and seizing the image of the scene beneath him as he flies, the astronomer is causing the heavenly bodies to print their images on the sensitive sheet he spreads under the rays concentrated by his telescope.  We have formerly taken occasion to speak of the wonderful stereoscopic figures of the moon taken by Mr. De la Rue in England, by Mr. Rutherford and by Mr. Whipple in this country.  To these most successful experiments must be added that of Dr. Henry Draper, who has constructed a reflecting telescope, with the largest silver reflector in the world, except that of the Imperial Observatory at Paris, for the special purpose of celestial photography.  The reflectors made by Dr. Draper “will show Debilissima quadruple, and easily bring out the companion of Sirius or the sixth star in the trapezium of Orion.”  In taking photographs from these mirrors, a movement of the sensitive plate of only one-hundredth of an inch will render the image perceptibly less sharp.  It was this accuracy of convergence of the light which led Dr. Draper to prefer the mirror to the achromatic lens.  He has taken almost all the daily phases of the moon, from the sixth to the twenty-seventh day, using mostly some of Mr. Anthony’s quick collodion, and has repeatedly obtained the full moon by means of it in one-third of a second.