10 Objects for the Microscope. 



Thousands of years have passed away since angel voices 

 sang the praises of God when He had finished the fair work 

 of creation, and looking upon the lowliest herb of the field 

 as upon the birds of the air, the living creatures of the 

 deep, wide sea, the beasts of the earth, and man, the lord 

 of all " behold it was very good." Thousands of years 

 have passed away : man has changed, it may be that the 

 lower creatures have partaken of his fall ; but of the beau- 

 tiful flowers and the stately trees we have no reason to 

 believe that there is aught in them that offends their 

 Maker; we fearlessly search into the recesses of their 

 being, and behold they are wondrously beautiful and still 

 " very good." 



A flower-plant has been likened by linger,* a German 

 botanist, to " a most skilfully-planned chemical laboratory, 

 a most ingenious mechanism for the display of physical 

 forces, and one of the simplest, and consequently one of the 

 most sublime, structures ever designed or executed." 



He also likens the growth of a plant to the building of 

 a glorious edifice ; he compares the cells of vegetable life, 

 in their varied forms and sizes, to the stones of a building 

 forming a kind of masonry. In some parts of a plant the 

 cells are long, and form pipes or cylinders, or they are 

 condensed and thickened into fibre. In the cuticle of leaf 

 and flower we have flattened, oblong, or crenellated cells, 

 which, as a tesselated pavement, protect the more delicate 

 machinery within. 



We find, by the help of a microscope, not only this, but 

 also the store chambers of cell-contents where the materials 

 for the plant edifice are collected and preserved. 



Again, in the building of .a plant there are air-passages 

 resembling regularly-shaped rooms, or romantic caves, or 

 microscopic grottos, terminating in what are called stomata; 

 which stomata have folding doors or valves to open or shut 

 at pleasure, so that the air circulates freely through the 

 plant organism. These are mostly on the under side of a 

 leaf, so the under cuticle is the one we mount for observa- 



* 'Unorer's Letters.' 



