EDUCATIONAL USES OF THE MICROSCOPE. 6-3 



large proportion of the great achievements of Microscopic re- 

 search that have been noticed in the preceding outline, have 

 been made by the instrumentality of microscopes which would 

 be generally condemned in the present days as utterly unfit for 

 any scientific purpose ; and it cannot for a moment be supposed, 

 that the field which Nature presents for the prosecution of in- 

 quiries with instruments of comparatively limited capacity, has 

 been in any appreciable degree exhausted. On the contrary, 

 what has been done by these and scarcely superior instruments, 

 only shows how much there is to be done. The author may be 

 excused for citing, as an apposite example of his meaning, the 

 curious results he has recently obtained from the study of the 

 development of the Purpura lapillus (rockwhelk), w r hich will be 

 detailed in their appropriate place (Chap. XII) ; for these were 

 obtained almost entirely by the aid of single lenses, the Compound 

 Microscope having been only occasionally applied to, for the 

 verification of what had been previously worked out, or for the 

 examination of such minute details as the power employed did 

 not suffice to reveal. 



But it should be urged upon such as are anxious to do service 

 to science, by the publication of discoveries which they suppose 

 themselves to have made with comparatively imperfect instru- 

 ments, that they will do well to refrain from bringing these for- 

 ward, until they shall have obtained the opportunity of verifying 

 them with better. It is, as already remarked, when an object is 

 least clearly seen, that there is most room for the exercise of the 

 imagination ; and there w r as sound sense in the reply once made 

 by a veteran observer, to one who had been telling him of won- 

 derful discoveries which another was said to have made "in spite 

 of the badness of his Microscope," "No, sir, it was in conse- 

 quence of the badness of his Microscope." If those who observe, 

 with however humble an instrument, will but rigidly observe the 

 rule of recording only what they can clearly see, they can neither 

 go far astray themselves, nor seriously mislead others. 



Among the erroneous tendencies which Microscopic inquiry 

 seems especially fitted to correct, is that which leads to the esti- 

 mation of things by their merely sensuous or material greatness, 

 instead of by their value in .extending our ideas and elevating 

 our aspirations. For we cannot long scrutinize the u world of 

 small" to which we thus find access, without having the convic- 

 tion forced upon us, that all size is but relative, and that mass 

 has nothing to do with real grandeur. There is something in 

 the extreme of minuteness, which is no less wonderful, might 

 it not almost be said, no less majestic ? than the extreme of 

 vastness. If the mind loses itself in the contemplation of the 

 immeasurable depths of space, and of the innumerable multi- 

 tudes of stars and systems by which they are peopled, it is equally 

 lost in wonder and admiration, when the eye is turned to those 

 countless multitudes of Hying beings which a single drop of 



