REVIEW. 
Catalogue of Objects in the Museum of the Microscopical 
Society of London, 1864. 
Ir has always been to us a matter of some surprise as well 
as regret that the authorities having the direction of great 
public museums in this country have hitherto taken no steps 
in the direction of exhibiting to the numerous persons seek- 
ing instruction and amusement in such places that vast field 
of life and structure which is opened out by the microscope. 
It is no less strange than true, that not only is our national 
collection destitute of the means necessary for rendering the 
public conversant with the minuter forms of life, and the de- 
tails of form in the higher animals, but even to the student 
no facilities whatever are afforded in the domain of microscopic 
research by that institution. It would be deemed probable by 
most persons that in a museum, one of whose chief directors 
has obtained great reputation as an odontologist, there should 
have been a collection of sections of various recent and fossil 
teeth, adapted for examination with the microscope, and 
arranged for comparison, not to speak of the series of well- 
mounted insects, Annelids, and other smaller and almost in- 
visible animals, that might have been looked for in the 
zoological department. But this is not the case; neither is 
there a collection of microscope-sections of teeth, nor any 
series of specimens mounted for use with that instrument. 
The student of comparative histology and minute zoology 
and botany would be left entirely to his own resources and 
those of his private friends, were it not for the existence of 
two collections in London to which he can gain access, and 
which, however incomplete, when we consider what a public 
collection of microscopic preparations ought to be, are never- - 
theless eminently useful and interesting, and tend far to 
supply the deficiency which we have noticed elsewhere. 
The histological collection of the Royal College of Surgeons 
is now open to the microscopist for purposes of comparison 
