Tue Microscope. 949 
round ; and its brief career is already crowded with achievenents 
astounding as miracles themselves. To-day it enables the anti- 
podes to clasp hands; and ere long they will talk together “as a 
man talketh with his friend.” But its prolific future is yet to be 
fully written; and who can grasp its possibilities in the varied 
agencies that shall yet employ it? 
But stepping down from these wider spheres, to more narrow 
limits in the fiefd of science, and the instruments therein made 
use of for the discovery and attainment of exact knowledge, we 
desire here to glance more especially at the future of the micro- 
scope. Like the future promise of “ the promised land,” we may 
say in the words addressed to Joshua, “there remaineth much 
land to be possessed.” 
Although the use of the lens is reputed to have been dis- 
covered by Layard in the palace of Nimrod (1500 B. C.), and 
lenses were referred to as ‘‘ burning spheres,” by Aristophanes in 
his day (5 B. C.), and afterwards commented upon by the philoso- 
phic Seneca in the first century of the Christian era, still, a dozen 
or more centuries rolled round, before we find a suggestion made 
for its practical use. Writers and essayists in modern encyclo- 
pedias, tell us, that it was not until the 17th century, that the lens, 
taking the form of the microscope, was employed for scientific in- 
vestigation, and they give us the names of Malpighi, Lieberktihn, 
‘Hooke, Leuwenhoeck and other learned German scholars, as the 
men entitled to the credit of its introduction to the world of science. 
But they somehow strangely overlook and ignore that prodigy of 
learning, Friar Roger Bacon, born in 1214, whose careful investiga- 
tions and experiments with the lens, certainly entitle him toa high 
place in connection with the microscope. Did space permit, we 
would like to refresh the memories of our more accomplished read- 
ers, with an extract on the subject from his Opus Majus; in which, 
at considerable length, he asserts and demonstrates his belief (doubt- 
less founded on personal experiments) “that small objects could be 
magnified and distant objects brought near, by means of single lenses and 
combination of lenses, and that these effects were produced by en- 
-larging, by means of refraction, the visual angles under which these 
objects were seen. Wood, in his history of Oxford, and Molyneua, 
in his Dioptrics, concur with yet other, writers in accrediting Bacon, 
as the inventor of the telescope; but anyone familiar with the ‘‘ won- 
