146 REMINISCENCES. 



suspects the work of a man who never uses the simple 

 microscope. 



His dissecting table was a thick board, let into a window 

 of the study ; it was lower than an ordinary table, so that 

 he could not have worked at it standing; but this, from 

 wishing to save his strength, he would not have done in any 

 case. He sat at his dissecting-table on a curious low stool 

 which had belonged to his father, with a seat revolving on 

 a vertical spindle, and mounted on large castors, so that he 

 could turn easily from side to side. His ordinary tools, &c., 

 were lying about on the table, but besides these a number 

 of odds and ends were kept in a round table full of radiating 

 drawers, and turning on a vertical axis, which stood close by 

 his left side, as he sat at his microscope-table. The drawers 

 were labelled, " best tools," " rough tools," " specimens," " pre- 

 parations for specimens," &c. The most marked peculiarity 

 of the contents of these drawers was the care with which little 

 scraps and almost useless things were preserved ; he held 

 the well-known belief, that if you threw a thing away you 

 were sure to want it directly and so things accumulated. 



If any one had looked at his tools, &c., lying on the table, 

 he would have been struck by an air of simpleness, make-shift, 

 and oddness. 



At his right hand were shelves, with a number of other odds 

 and ends, glasses, saucers, tin biscuit boxes for germinating 

 seeds, zinc labels, saucers full of sand, &c., &c. Considering 

 how tidy and methodical he was in essential things, it is 

 curious that he bore with so many make-shifts : for instance, 

 instead of having a box made of a desired shape, and 

 stained black inside, he would hunt up something like what 

 he wanted and get it darkened inside with shoe-blacking ; 

 he did not care to have glass covers made for tumblers in 

 which he germinated seeds, but used broken bits of irregular 

 shape, with perhaps a narrow angle sticking uselessly out on 

 one side. But so much of his experimenting was of a simple 



