i7o THE MICROSCOPE. 



do not mean the man who makes the instruments, for him there un- 

 doubtedly is ample room, and almost every month we have to hail 

 improvements that make our work more easy. But the Microscope 

 is a tool of trade for some. We have heard that the intricate and 

 charming markings of diatoms and Foraminifera have been used by 

 pattern designers, and in some trades the Microscope is daily used. 

 About a year ago I was at the Italian National Exhibition at Milan. 

 Among the most interesting of the exhibits was the process of silk 

 producing and manufacture. At that exhibition the results were not 

 merely shown, but all the details from the beginning to the end, 

 and a row of microscopists with persistent care examined the silk- 

 worm eggs, picking out and rejecting every egg that showed any 

 symptom of disease. But why go to Milan? Has not the greatest 

 of your legislators declared that by the aid of a powerful microscope 

 he was enabled to determine on the spot the magnificent 

 character and splendid suitability of the Stawell stone for our 

 new halls of legislature? In this Society it would be of thrilling 

 interest to hear what was the powerful instrument he used — how he 

 used it in the trying circumstances of the Parliamentary picnic — 

 what he learned — and how he learned it by looking at a lump of 

 sandstone? But this is perhaps too much to expect; let us be con- 

 tent that the value of your instrument has been acknowledged in 

 those halls of wit and wisdom. I think I must place this new-caught 

 specimen in a unique sub-species of his own, and label him M. 

 ludificatio. I hardly dare translate this title, but its English 

 synonym is not far off 'humbug.' 



"Under M. tabemarius, as a sub-species, we will place M. 

 detergitata {sic), or the detective microscopist. Here we come to a 

 class directly useful to mankind. By the aid of the microscope we 

 discover largely what it is that we eat and drink, how sometimes 

 very widely the real differs from the apparent, and how true it is 

 that "things are not what they seem" — a wide field, that has hitherto 

 not been taken up to any extent by our Society. Under this species 

 I had intended to have ranged myself during the past year, and to 

 have done something worthy of your attention for this meeting: but, 

 alas, it has been but a good resolution, and gone, I fear, where many 

 other good resolutions have gone before it. This I have done: pre- 

 pared a series of test starches for comparison, some eighteen or 

 twenty slides of which I had the pleasure of placing in the Society's 



