12 
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 7TH, 1905. 
Photo- Micrograph. 
Dr BeSererT a, -M.D., FRM 3s 
Illustrated with Lantern Slides. 
‘“‘ M\HE marvels of the infinitely small are as wonderful as the 
marvels of the infinitely great.” The statement was made 
to the members by Dr. E. Spitta when lecturing on the subject of 
‘¢ nhoto-micrography,” and he easily proved his point. Dr, Spitta 
is a scientist who has won distinction in regions of which few of 
us are conscious by reason of the fact that we cannot see them. 
Dr. Spitta revels in things which are too small to be seen by 
the naked eye, so small that the point of a needle would make a 
fine platform for the concourse of an army of them, and now, with 
the aid of amazing photographs which he has taken by the process 
of photo-micrography, he was able to lead his audience with him 
to explore the wonders of the infinitely small. 
To magnify a thing by a thousand diameters was nothing to 
Dr. Spitta; when he had done that he had only got his object 
ready to begin the real work of magnifiying it. He showed a 
photograph of a human hair. The hair was magnified enough to 
look like a ship’s cable, and beside it was a minute object, 
shaped like a torpedo, which could just be seen. He magnified 
this further and further till he had it as big as the screen; 
he magnified it until one could see that it was crossed with 
myriads of lines, perfectly parallel, perfectly regular,—over six 
hundred of them could be counted in a space equal to the thick- 
ness of a fine hair of the head. Even then he was not content, 
and he magnified it still further until these parallel lines were found 
to be composed of dots. In order to see these dots, they had to 
be magnified by 80,000 diameters,—at which rate an inch would 
be magnified into a mile anda quarter! So minute is the process 
that an error in the focussing of one hundredth-thousandth part 
of an inch would ‘spoil the picture; the vibration caused by a 
person sneezing in the next room would destroy it. 
Among dozens of exceedingly interesting slides that Dr. 
Spitta threw on the screen was a series showing the wonderful 
provision of nature for enabling the human body to recover from 
