XIV, 4. Andrews: Preservation of protoplasmic spinnings. 451 



recognise often delicate differences between such results and those 

 of coagulation or osmotic exudations. Tbe very failures in detail 

 are of themselves helpfully suggestive as to our results where it is 

 not known what did exist in tbe living state ; tbey are valuable too, 

 because ordinary methods, even when used witb extra care and 

 sympathy with tbe conditions to be met, bad failed wholly to give 

 any recognisable record of tbese pbenomena. 



At every step of any metbod used for these finer pbenomena, 

 tbere must be many probabilities to be guaged and measured, and 

 to be met by one's perception of such conditions — as a Photographie 

 plate must be exposed and developed. Tbere is always a complex 

 of varying conditions, and besides those general rhythmic variatious 

 which can be learned by experience, tbere are incidental and minor 

 variatious which one must learn to pereeive but can hardly express 

 and certainly not control. We can never hope to bring into suf- 

 ficiently intimate contact at a given moment, tbe protoplasmic condi- 

 tions and tbe ehemieal reagents. This means of course many failures 

 and many only partial successes , but these can not be charged 

 justly to tbe metbod as yet. The same must be true of any metbod 

 applied to these finer pbenomena, and tbe caiises leading to failnre 

 are inalienable and exaeting. 



Wholesale methods must more and more be left to those who 

 seek for general large relations of secondary phenomena, while he 

 who seeks to understand these and those underlyiiig them, must more 

 and more bend bis will and patience to meet microscopically minute 

 pbenomena in a microscopically minute way, limiting bis preser- 

 vation work as well as bis attention to very small points in Single 

 instances. He will no longer „put up" „batches" of material, but 

 will spend much time in tbe effort to gain success in a few out of 

 many hundred Single eggs, each of which has been handled as if 

 it were tbe only one in tbe world. He must use a delicate tact 

 and plastic experience that cannot be expressed in words. The 

 field would seem to be one peculiarly adapted to tbe powers of 

 women workers. 



At Woods Höll, in 1893, I devised a metbod of camera-drawing 

 which proved invaluable for recording delicate protoplasmic pheno- 

 mena and which bad tbe honour to be commended by Dr. Whitman. 

 Instead of white drawing paper, I used dark shades of thin, dull 

 surface, tinted papers, varying tbe shade and hue aecording to 

 tbe amouut of light — on brightest days using black. The point 



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