122 ELEMENTARY CHEMICAL MICROSCOPY 



Tiny pipettes may be employed for transferring solutions or 

 liquid reagents, but are so difficult to keep thoroughly clean that 

 it is wiser to employ short lengths of tubing of capillary bore made 

 by drawing out odds and ends of glass tubing. Such substitutes 

 for pipettes draw up the solutions to which they are touched by 

 capillarity the liquid can easily be expelled by gently blowing 

 into one end of the tube, the other end being held against an 

 object slide. After transferring the liquid, the capillary tube is 

 thrown away. 



Spatulas. Larger amounts of dry reagents than can con- 

 veniently be handled by the glass rods or platinum wires may be 

 transferred by means of small platinum spatulas, Fig. 68, made 



FIG. 68. Platinum Spatula for Microchemical Analysis. (Full size.) 



from a piece of platinum wire about one millimeter in diameter 

 and 80 to 85 millimeters long, one end of which is hammered out 

 flat on a polished steel surface until it becomes a little over 3 

 millimeters wide and the flattened surface about 10 millimeters 

 long. The blade thus prepared is shaped and smoothed with a 

 fine file and polished. The end of the handle is given a gentle 

 blow or two with a hammer, filed to a double chisel edge and 

 polished, thus giving an instrument useful in breaking up small 

 fragments of soft salts, or in loosening reagents in the set of vials 

 referred to above. 



FIG. 69. Forceps for Microscopic Work. (Full size.) 



Forceps. For picking up tiny fragments of dry material, 

 handling cover glasses, small watch glasses, etc., forceps (Fig. 

 69) with fine curved tips are indispensable. The corrugations 

 usually found on the points should be carefully filed away until 

 the tips are almost smooth. 



