164 THE MICROSCOPE AND ITS PREPARATIONS. 



discover except as the finest dust, are objects which once seen 

 will never be forgotten. 



The ever varied and delightful colorings of the flowers have 

 no beauty under the microscope. But if you examine those 

 gaily colored stamens and pistils under a magnifying power of 

 about a hundred diameters, you will see, adhering to them in 

 myriads, minute grains of pollen of exquisite pattern and beauty. 

 They are the object of all the growth and the display of the 

 flowers; but are things which no eye had seen, save as an impal- 

 pable powder, until the microscope revealed them. 



So through all the list of objects in nature, with hardly an ex- 

 ception, the things which strike our eyes and that we call so 

 beautiful, are not the things which will bear the enlargement of 

 microscopic vision. And it seems to me that there is a natural 

 boundary a line of demarkation between these two realms of 

 vision ; as if each had been produced for its own particular and 

 separate purpose. We can readily understand the reason of the 

 development of that which through all time has pleased or served 

 the eye of man. Every thing in nature, it is said, at least in or- 

 ganic nature, has its utility, its adaptation to some useful end. 

 But of what use could be the production or development of colors 

 or forms or beauties, other than such as can be seen by ordinary 

 eyes? And there are no indications, so far as we can judge upon 

 optical principles or by comparative anatomy, that any other 

 eyes see images much more magnified than do ours. I may then 

 propound the questions which have so often puzzled me : "Why 

 was this nether world, this microscopic world, which is vaster in 

 its limits and more wonderful than the other, which no eye had 

 seen or could see, before the invention of compound lenses some 

 three hundred years. ago, why or how was this world ever brought 

 into being, at least in such beauty and marvelousness ? Why the 

 almost inconceivably minute and accurate rulings and curves and 

 radials on the shells of the lowly diatoms, when there were no 

 senses that could perceive them ? Why the complicate clottings 

 and etchings on the almost invisible scales of the insect tribes, 

 when there was no vision in the world that could see them ? 

 But children can ask questions which the philosophers cannot 



