9 6 REMINISCENCES OF 



which I asked him to send to me. The wretched 

 old instrument certainly revealed these minute 

 organisms, though very imperfectly. I then sought 

 the aid of Mr. Dancer, the well-known optician of 

 Manchester, in making some changes in the old 

 instrument to give it better defining power. This 

 was accomplished to a limited but unsatisfactory 

 extent. 



At that time Dancer was constructing some 

 beautiful, but in my eyes very costly microscopes, 

 apparently out of my reach. Meanwhile I became 

 personally acquainted with Dr. Mantell, and we ex- 

 changed letters almost weekly. Stimulated partly 

 by him, and partly by association with Mr. Joseph 

 Sidebotham, then a young merchant, but already an 

 enthusiastic entomologist as well as a practical 

 botanist, studying especially the lower confervse, 

 Diatomacese, and Desmidiacae, and who became ulti- 

 mately head of one of the oldest firms of calico- 

 printers in Manchester; I found myself drawn 

 nolens volens into the vortex of microscopic obser- 

 vation, which was ultimately so largely the work 

 of my life, an wholly unexpected result of my visit 

 to the aged widow's tea-party. Progress in my 

 professional position encouraged me to be less fear- 

 ful of the scientific occupation of my leisure hours 

 being known, and I was elected member, and hence- 

 forth attended the meetings, of the Manchester 

 Literary and Philosophical Society. At one of 

 these meetings, a young man of the name of Play- 



