^ 



THE GUIDE TO NATURE 



A Photograph of a Lynx Cat. 



Idr. S. C. Baker of Wallingford. Ver- 

 Tnont, sends us an interesting and lifelike 

 photograph of a lynx cat. Its length 



A LYNX CAT. 



was five feet from tip to tip, its weight 

 fifty-one pounds. It was shot by Mr. A. 

 E. Rodgers of Wallingford. 



The Abandoned Art of Micro- 

 photography. 



What is microphotography ? Do not 

 confuse it as it is often confused, with 

 photomicrography. 



Photomicrography is a large pho- 

 tograph of a microscopic object. It is 

 usually made through a microscope by 

 the aid of microscope objectives alone 

 or with the addition of the eyepiece. 



Photomacography is a term less fre- 

 quently used but is employed by some 

 opticians to designate enlarged photo- 

 graphs of moderately small objects. 

 The work is done with short focus 

 camera lenses and usually with a long 

 camera. 



These are but tw^o forms of magni- 

 fying photography, although the dis- 

 tincdon between the two is not always 

 absolutely sharp and fast. 



Microphotography is exactly the re- 

 verse and consists of carrying to an ex- 

 treme minimizing photography. Near- 

 ly all ordinary photography w^ith a camera 

 stands about the same relation in mini- 

 mizing that photomacrography has to 



magnifying. For example, a child with 

 a small camera takes a picture of his 

 schoolmate who is four feet tall. The 

 photograph is perhaps an inch in 

 height. This is a micro photograph ; 

 the object is reduced in size. Your 

 friend may also be microphoto 

 graphed so that you may examine his 

 l)icture under the microscope. Such 

 photographs are invisible to the naked 

 eye. While these microphotographs 

 are extremely interesting and a few of 

 them are to be found in nearly all 

 microscopical cabinets yet the making 

 of microphotographs is practically an 

 abandoned art. There is one micropho- 

 tographer in Germany and another in 

 Manchester, England, but so far as an 

 extensive correspondence has revealed 

 there are few workers in this country. 



Mr. Edward Pennock of Philadel- 

 phia writes as follows : 



"Francis T. Harmon, 3920 Ellis Ave- 

 nue, Chicago, Illinois, has been doing 

 some good work in this line of late ; he 

 has sold some microphotographs of 

 'The Declaration of Independence' 

 made from an old copy (engraving) 

 which I obtained for him at an old- 

 book shop here, and which I believe is 

 the same as the one copied by Langen- 

 heim in Philadelphia along about i860 

 or thereabouts." 



When these photographs were pop- 

 ular as interesting things with which 

 to entertain the microscopist's unsci- 

 entific friends, such objects as the fol- 

 lowing were common : "A Ticket to 

 Heaven" (a. card of admission to a 

 Sunday School bearing much good ad- 

 vice) ; "The Lord's Prayer" ; Land- 

 seer's "The Stag at Bay" ; Gray's 

 "Elegy" ; the Presidents of the United 

 States ; Niagara Falls, and similar sub- 

 jects. These, and others like them, 

 had no natural science value. They are 

 preserved in our cabinets of slides as 

 curiosities. 



Photomicrographs are vastly dififer- 

 ent. These are usually instructive and 

 valuable, permanently recording the 

 microscopic structure of objects other- 

 wise invisible, and probably incapable 

 of being made visible to the majority 

 of human beings. Scientific magazines 

 and similar publications and their 

 readers would sufifer great loss if pho- 

 tomicrography should cease to exist, 

 of which there is not the slightest 

 dansfer. 



