MEMBERS OF THE MICROSCOPIC SECTION. 303 
But He has indicated His will, on this subject, by planting 
in man’s bosom an intuitive craving for knowledge, which 
impels him to investigation and research, whilst it enables 
him to receive pleasure from those lofty generalizations 
that science finally aims to establish. If each man who, 
from the beginning, ever entered upon scientific inquiries, 
had but left behind him the trustworthy record of one 
single and previously unknown fact, how much larger a 
mass of information should we have possessed than at 
present ? 
I trust that our members may record many such facts ; 
for the field of operation is so boundless, that steady 
perseverance is certain to be rewarded with success. In 
one respect we labour under a disadvantage compared 
with earlier observers. In the days of Leeuwenhoek and 
Hooke, when the microscope was a new instrument, and 
its revelations an unknown world, the observations made 
even by means of their imperfect instruments were won- 
drous, and their results great. They could not possibly 
go wrong in the search for subjects. They lay strewed 
around them on every hand. Consequently, we find the 
Memoirs of Leeuwenhoek abounding in notices of the 
structure of flies and spiders, sections of wood and such 
like matters, now familiar to every tyro. Not only was 
new material abundant, but his whole time could be given 
to its examination. Ploughing in a virgin soil, he was 
under no bondage to past and contemporaneous journal- 
ism — not troubled with the study of other men’s re- 
searches, or in danger of being charged with appro- 
priating other men’s discoveries. With us the case is 
different. All common objects have been examined again 
and again. It is true a new field has been opened to us 
by the discovery of the achromatic lens; but the obser- 
vations to which this improvement has led have assumed 
a more minute and abstruse character than was formerly 
