OBITUARY NOTICE OF THE LATE JOSEPH JACKSON 



LISTER, F.R.S., Z.S. 



WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO HIS LABOURS 

 IN THE IMPROVEMENT OF THE ACHROMATIC :\rirROSCOPE 



Contributed in a Letter to the President of the Royal Microscopical Society. 

 [Monthly Microscopical Journal, Marcli i, 1S70.] 



Communicated by the President at the Anniversary, Februarv 9, 1870. 



Edinburgh, February 8, 1870. 



My dear Sir. — In comphance with your request, I proceed to furnish 

 you with some particulars regarding my late dear and honoured father. 



He was born in London on the nth of January, 1786, his parents being 

 highly respected members of the Society of Friends. At fourteen years of age 

 he left school to assist his father in the wine trade : but though he was for manv 

 years closely occupied in business, he contrived, by early rising and otherwise, 

 to supplement largely the plain, though good, school education he had received, 

 and he was in many respects a self-taught man. Such was the case as regards 

 his mathematical knowledge, which he turned to such excellent account in his 

 labours for the improvement of the microscope. 



His predilection for optics manifested itself very early. He used to tell 

 how, when a little child, he enjoyed looking at the prospect through air-bubbles 

 in the window-pane, which improved the vision of the then myopic e\-e and 

 enabled him to see distant objects with distinctness. This fact afterwards 

 led him to think it probable that in very young children the eye is generally 

 myopic. The same taste was indicated when he was a bo\' at school b\- tlit 

 circumstance that he alone of all the boys possessed a telescope. 



The achromatic microscope was early an object of interest to him ; but 

 it was not till the year 1824, when he was thirty-eight years okl, tliat he did 

 anything to improve the object-glass. His first work of this kind is recorded 

 in a note, dated 1825, to the following effect : ' The ^\ and ,;, achromatic object- 

 glasses, made bv W. Tullry at Dr. Goring's suggestion, delighted me In their 

 beautiful j)erlurniaucc, but they appeared to me lo luiw a great disadwmtage 

 in consecpience of the thickness in i->rojx)rtion to their focal length, which W. T. 



