92 THE MICROSCOPE. 
the greatest possible care to keep the spores in their natural place by 
giving them as small a quantity, not of pure spirits of wine, which 
scatters them, but benzole, which has a different effect. Let the 
benzole evaporate, then mount. When Canada balsam will not suit, 
as is generally the case, I use gelatine, warming all the materials 
used. Water I may say is, to the best of my knowledge, indispensa- 
ble when you want to see such portions of a fungus as the zoospores. 
Much advantage may be gained by putting on the label of the slide 
not only the name of the object but the medium in which the same 
is mounted. I have slides in my cabinet of great scarcity, which it 
would be next to impossible to replace. Some of them have lost the 
whole of the medium in which they are placed through evaporation, 
aud are almost valueless. Others have not gone so badly, but there 
are large bubbles of air in them, which are the forerunners of total 
evaporation. Had the original mounter of the same named the fluid 
in which they were placed on the slide, there would have been little 
difficulty in bringing them back to their primitive condition. 
DANGER IN THE Postage Stamp.—The Sanitary News calls atten- 
tion to the fact that a postage stamp may in various ways convey con- 
tagion. One of the simplest and most plausible, is that in which a 
postage stamp, partly attached to a letter to pay return postage, is 
sent by a person infected with some disease to another person. The 
disease is transferred in the first place to the adhesive stamp through 
the saliva, and in being attached to the letter by the receiver the 
poison may be transmitted to him in turn through the saliva. Another 
cause may be the infection of the stamp with disease germs. That 
this is true can be proven very simply by a microscopical examination. 
We often see persons holding change for a moment in the 
mouth, probably not knowing that investigation has shown that dis- 
ease germs can be carried by money. If they could see through 
what hands the money has passed, they would hesitate before using 
such a third hand. Silver money is as bad as paper money, but 
while many would hesitate to hold a dirty bank note in the mouth, 
they think that a silver piece, because bright, is apparently clean.— 
Medical News. 
Uses or Puotomicograpuy.*—Bastelberger’s paper before the 
Society of German Naturalists and Physicians dealt with the uses of 
photomicrography, in which the author favored the wet-plate process. 
This is of great service in permanently fixing the pictures of rapidly 
* Neural. Centralblatt, October 1, 1888. 
