Organic Remains, Crystals, and Artificial Objects. 101 



the reader who looks in this book for some account 

 of their history, the method of their production, and 

 the use (if any) which has been made of them, to look 

 in vain. 



The idea of employing the photographic principle 

 in producing specimens of printing so small as to 

 be legible only with the microscope, occurred to Mr. 

 Dancer, of Manchester, so long ago as the year 1839. 

 This was several years before the discovery of the 

 collodion process, and accordingly these were daguerre- 

 otypes. Mr. Dancer reduced a bill twenty inches in 

 length to one-eighth of an inch ; but as the nature of 

 the deposit on silver plates prevented the lines being 

 fine enough to admit of being viewed with any but 

 the lower powers of the microscope, he laid the 

 matter aside, till the year 1852, when Mr. Archer's 

 discovery of the collodion process enabled him to 

 produce far minuter specimens. He paid considerable 

 attention to the subject, and has since that time exe- 

 cuted some specimens which are indeed marvels of 

 photography. 



At a meeting of the Manchester Photographic 

 Society, on April 6th, 1859, a microscopic photograph 

 by Mr. Dancer was exhibited, consisting of two pages 

 of " Quekett's Treatise on the Microscope/' reduced 

 to one sixteen-hundredth part of a superficial inch 

 (that is to say, if the two pages made a square, such 

 square was one-fortieth of an inch in diameter.) They 

 included three thousand six hundred and thirty- 

 one letters, and at the same rate the whole volume of 

 five hundred and sixty pages could be contained 



