124 THE MICROSCOPE. 



ous, manly hospitality to our houses, homes and church building — 

 everywhere that it lies in our power to invite you. 



Whether our own little society was born of " colloid " or of 

 " crystalloid " matter does not appear; whether changed by heat, 

 light and moisture the aggregation of atoms that now go to make it 

 up, had an " a-bioplastic " or a "bioplastic" origin — who can tell? 

 Yet in my meditations I have been inclined to think that it did not 

 begin absolutely by itself nor grow to its present state unaided. 

 Who knows but the germ was some " plastidule " of thought or hint 

 thrown out by the parent society, your own ? But nourished by 

 food transmitted to us by men of learning and thought — long since 

 fallen asleep, urged on by those hidden forces that inspire all 

 things of life the world over, we have attained our present humble 

 standing in the world of science. And like some undifferentiated 

 unicellular organism, akin to the amoeba, we reach out our pseudo- 

 podia in the hope that some particles of mental food and spiritual 

 comfort, dropped by you, may adhere to them to be absorbed, and 

 we trust digested by us. And, perchance, by social intercourse and 

 interchange of thought, we may become differentiated, until some 

 day we shall no longer need wide-angled objectives to sweep a wide 

 range of vision, nor narrow-angled ones to attain precise, close 

 vision ; but amid a higher and higher environment, our vision, now 

 dim-eyed shall be cleared so that we shall see things as they are, 

 without interposition of microscopes or telescopes. 



A storm of applause greeted our gray-haired sire when he had 

 done ; then. Dr. Blackham responded becomingly and happily, in 

 terms more at length, when the meeting was opened in regular form 

 for business. Forty-four members were at once elected, when Prof. 

 Kellicott read a paper on " Certain Crustaceous Parasites of Fresh 

 Water Fishes" ; Dr. Redding, of Newcastle, Pa., on "The Advan- 

 tages of Osmic Acid as a Staining and Hardening Medium." In the 

 discussion following, Prof. Gage, of Cornell University, pointed to 

 the fact that osmic acid was also useful in killing, instantly, any 

 animalcule that it was desirable to mount with organs distended — 

 like the rotifers, for instance. 



C. M. Vorce, of Cleveland, read a paper on " Forms Observed 

 in the Waters of Lake Erie," eliciting much information in the dis- 

 cussion which followed and in the comparisons made with the water 

 supply of Buffalo, Utica, Elmira and other sources. No one is 



