134 Transactions of the [^Monthly Muroscopica. 



LJourual, March 1, IbTO. 



II.— OBITUAKY NOTICE 



Of the late Joseph Jackson Lister, F.E.S., Z.S., ivith special 

 reference to his Labours in tlie Improvement of the Achromatic 

 Microscope. Contributed, in a letter to the President of the 

 Eoyal Microscopical Society, by Joseph Lister, F.E.S., Pro- 

 fessor of Clinical Surgery in the University of Edinburgh. 



(Communicated by the President at the Anniversary, February 9, 1870.) 



My dear Sir, Edinburgh, 8th February^ 1870. 



In compliance with your request, I proceed to furnish you 

 with some particulars regarding my late dear and honoured father. 



He was born in London on the 11th of January, 1786, his 

 parents being highly respected members of the Society of Friends. 

 At fourteen years of age he left school to assist his father in the 

 wine trade : but though he was for many years closely occupied in 

 business, he contrived, by early rising and otherwise, to supple- 

 ment largely the plain, though good, school education he had 

 received, and he was in many resj^ects a self-taught man. Such 

 was the case as regards his mathematical knowledge, which he 

 turned to such excellent account in his labour's for the improve- 

 ment of the microscope. 



His predilection for optics manifested itself very early. He 

 used to tell how, when a Httle child, he enjoyed looking at the 

 prospect through air-bubbles in the window-pane, which improved 

 the vision of the then myopic eye and enabled him to see distant 

 objects with distinctness. This fact afterwards led him to think it 

 j)robable that in very young children the eye is generally myopic. 

 The same taste was indicated when he was a boy at school by the 

 circumstance that he alone of all the boys possessed a telescope. 



The achromatic microscope was early an object of interest to 

 him; but it was not till the year 1824, when he was thirty-eight 

 years old, that he did anything to improve the object-glass. His 

 first work of this kind is recorded in a note, dated 1825, to the 

 following effect : — " The -y^ and -f^ achromatic object-glasses, made 

 by W. Tulley at Dr. Goring's suggestion, dehghted me by their 

 beautiful performance, but they appeared to me to have a great 

 disadvantage in consequence of the thickness in proportion to their 

 focal length, which W. T. thought could not be avoided. I there- 

 fore induced him to make for me one of W much thinner in pro- 

 portion, and had the satisfaction to find its performance very 

 nearly equal to his best i^y . In one resjDcct, indeed, it is superior ; 

 showing when in good adjustment the reflection from a minute 

 ball of mercury a bright point in any part of the field, while in the 



