PROCEEDINGS OF THE SOCIETY. 163 



Mr. John Rattray gave a resume of his paper " On a Revision of the 

 Genus Auliscus Ehrb. and of some of the Allied Genera" (see this 

 Journal, 1888, p. 861). 



The President vras sure that all would feel greatly obliged to Mr. 

 Rattray for this communication, for nothing could be more useful than 

 to have these revisions from time to time, embodying as they did all 

 that was known of the particular group dealt with. He thought it was 

 very fortunate that the Society possessed a Secretary and staff who did 

 so much in the way of collecting together and classifying facts in 

 microscopy as was the case. Those who recollected the old ' Monthly 

 Microscopical Journal,' and compared it with the Journal of the Society 

 at the present time, would fully understand the great difference between 

 them and the great advance made. 



The President called attention to M. Weber's paper " On Rotifera 

 from the Neighbourhood of Geneva," which he criticized in detail, 

 showing the ridiculous mistakes into which the author had fallen. 

 Amongst other points, M. Weber declared that a structure which the 

 President and others had recorded as having been seen by them (but 

 which M. Weber could not see) had been seen by the eye of faith only ! 

 It might, perhaps, be said that more consideration shoiild be shown to 

 the author. He thought, however, that it would be well sometimes to 

 express a little more freely than usual a strong sense of the grievous 

 mischief done by the kind of papers which they sometimes met with 

 upon these and other subjects, in which the want of knowledge and care 

 on the part of the writers led them into a statement of errors of the 

 most remarkable kind, calculated not only to mislead, but to bring dis- 

 credit upon the investigations of others with whose work they were 

 unacquainted, and upon the branch of science to which the subjects 

 belonged. 



Mr. Crisp said that the same mischief which the President had 

 referred to in connection with zoological matters had recently been 

 manifested in a similarly aggravated form in the branch of microscopical 

 optics. 



Mr. J. May all, jun., said it would be remembered that at the previous 

 meeting a paper by Prof. Govi had been read, in which it was sought to 

 prove that the compound Microscope was invented by Galileo in 1610. 

 Apart from the question as to whether Prof. Govi was justified in 

 regarding the Galilean combination of a convex object-glass and a 

 concave eye-lens as strictly a compound Microscope, he thought the 

 magnifying power obtained by Galileo was probably much exaggerated 

 by the testimony of witnesses who were thus describing their first 

 experience in viewing magnified objects. He did not think it possible 

 to obtain a magnification of 36 diameters by the Galilean Microscope, as 

 stated in one of Govi's quotations. That any one looking through a 

 Microscope for the first time should exclaim that a flea appeared as big 

 as an elephant was matter of common experience; but such random 

 observations were of no value, for in the great majority of cases the 

 actual magnification amounted to 10 or 15 diameters only, such as 

 might be obtained with an ordinary pocket-lens. He questioned 

 the possibility of obtaining a useful magnification of 36 diameters 

 with any Galilean combination, and certainly not with the so-called 



