THE MINUTE ANATOMISTS C29 



a microscope which revealed the structure of an insect's 

 eye. Within twenty years of this date the working 

 opticians of Holland, Paris, and London sold compound 

 microscopes, which, though cumbrous as well as opti- 

 cally defective, revealed many natural wonders to the 

 curious. Simple lenses, sometimes of high power, 

 came before long to be preferred by working naturalists, 

 and it was with them that all the best work of the 

 seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was done. 



The power of the microscope as an instrument of 

 biological research was in some measure revealed by 

 Hooke's Micrographia (1665). Robert Hooke was a 

 man of extraordinary ingenuity and scientific fertility, 

 who took a leading part in the early work of the Royal 

 Society. He opens his book with an account of the 

 simple and the compound microscope of his own day, 

 and then goes on to explain, with the help of large and 

 elaborate engraved plates, the structure of a number 

 of minute objects. The most interesting are : A Fora- 

 miniferous shell, snow-crystals, a thin section of cork 

 showing its component cells, moulds, a bit of Flustra, 

 the under side of a nettle-leaf with its epidermic cells 

 and stinging-hairs, the structure of a feather, the foot 

 of a fly, the scales of a moth's wing, the eye of a fly, 

 a gnat-larva, and a flea. The beauty of the plates and 

 the acuteness of some of the explanations are remark- 

 able, but lack of connection between the topics dis- 

 cussed hinders the Micrographia from rising to a very 

 high scientific level. 



Swammerdam treated the microscope as an instru- 

 ment of continuous biological research. In his eyes it 

 was a sacred duty to explore with the utmost faithful- 

 ness the minute works of the Creator. Insects yielded 

 him an inexhaustible supply of natural contrivances, in 



