1894.] MICROSCOPICAL JOURNAL. 21 



that other advantages may be gained. And as the par- 

 tisans of tliis stand are chiefly found among the ranks of 

 anatomists, it seemed reasonable to look for the original 

 designer among them also, the result being that I have 

 arrived at conclusions that appear novel and interesting, 

 and worth communicating to others. 



The Parisian optician Oberhaeuser is generally named 

 as the inventor of this stand, but it is not easy to under- 

 stand how an optician by himself could have arrived at 

 a model so defective from the optician's point of view, 

 and differing so widely from the other types of micro- 

 scope in use at the time. Let us, however, suppose him 

 to have worked under directions, and the matter becomes 

 easy of explanation. Accordingly, upon investigation 

 I met with repeated assertions, never effectively denied, 

 on the part of a certain anatomist, that it was he who 

 designed the original model of the Continental stand for 

 his own particular use, and that it was made for him by 

 the firm to which Oberhaeuser belonged, and, finally, 

 that with his sanction it was patented by them, so as to 

 give them for a certain period a monopoly of the manu- 

 facture — a fact which well explains its association with 

 their names. I also find that this firm was permitted 

 by the anatomist Dujardin to do the same thing with an 

 achromatic condenser which he had invented, and, in- 

 deed, that they were actually the first opticians in France 

 who conceived the idea of patenting inventions in con- 

 nection with the microscope ; but to substantiate this 

 position requires the enumeration of a considerable 

 number of details. 



The anatomist to whom I have referred, Strauss- 

 Durckheim by name, pupil of Cuvier, first addressed the 

 scientific public with a work on the anatomy of the 

 Coleoptera, in which the common cockchafer served as a 

 type, which work being beautifully illustrated from his 

 own dissections, aroused some curiosity, as he tells us 



