S DELICATE TRACERY OF DIATOMS 



steam-engine or the watch, to say nought of those 

 rare works of art that from age to age have been 

 described as perfect of their kind, are wondrously 

 beautiful; and beautiful they are, but in com- 

 parison with some of the exquisite objects 

 subjected to the photographer's art in the follow- 

 ing pages they are indeed coarse and crude. 

 The writing of the Lord's Prayer on a surface 

 no larger in area than that covered by a three- 

 penny piece is looked upon as a great piece of 

 penmanship, but how the lines so made suffer 

 by comparison with some of the objects here 

 photographed. The delicate tracery of the 

 Heliopelta metii (Fig. 3), of the beautiful 

 diatom from Bori, in Hungary (Fig. 5), or of 

 the Coscinodiscus bi-angulatus (Fig. 4), can 

 only be properly ' resolved ' or brought into 

 view by the use of magnifications so great that 

 if applied to an object one inch in length they 

 would make it appear to be nearly sixty-eight 

 yards long, or would magnify the finest, most 

 beautiful silk that the spinner and weaver can 

 produce into something far rougher than a 

 wattle fence or a fabric woven of ship's cables. 



