NOTES ON MICRO-ORGANISMS. 15 
useful, unless one is in a position to apply micro-photography ; 
and I might just allude in passing to the results in this art 
that have lately been obtained, in Burton especially, by one 
gentleman who was good enough, at a previous meeting of 
our Section, to put us in the way of similar achievements. 
In looking over some very old volumes of the history of 
the Royal Society, published in 1756, I found some interesting 
references to letters received by the Society about the year 
1680 from the Dutch scientist, Leuwenhoek, in which he 
describes his discovery of minute organisms obtained from the 
lees of wine and beer, and from other sources, such as putrid 
water, saliva, &c. Two or three years previously I find that 
Dr. Hooke had brought under the notice of the Society certain 
observations of his on small moving organisms in infusions of 
pepper and some other vegetable products. He had also seen 
organisms in the contents of the stomach under certain 
conditions. From the very brief and inadequate description, 
I conclude that Hooke’s microscope and apparatus were not 
sufficiently good to enable him to see the organisms with any 
degree of clearness ; and before he could forward his investiga- 
tions Leuwenhoek, with his greatly improved objectives, had 
made independent and much more rapid progress. A certain 
Dr. King, working contemporaneously with Hooke, had also 
described organisms before the Society, ‘thousands of which,” 
to use his own words, were less ‘than a blood globule,” by 
which last he presumably means a blood corpuscle. There is 
a suspicion of exaggeration in this statement. Seeing that 200 
years have elapsed since Leuwenhoek and these other investi- 
gators, Drs. Hooke and King, recognized and described what 
were undoubtedly Bacteria, it seems rather strange that not till 
the last 15 or 20 years should any very rapid advance have been 
made in this branch of scientific investigation, though during 
the period last mentioned, progress has indeed been rapid, assisted 
undoubtedly by the greater state of perfection to which the 
microscope has been brought, but more especially owing to the 
great talent and patient skill brought to bear by men whose 
