182 Transactions of the Society. 



tlible. They will be regarded as the idle fancies of an idle mind ; 

 and the ardent scientific inquirer will be pitied or condemned as a 

 weak, foolish person who, like a child, is unable to repress his 

 morbid curiosity to peer into the unseen, and his craving to know 

 the unknowable; — as one deserving to be classed with simpletons 

 and madmen, on the ground that it is absurd to suppose that a 

 really sensible person would spend his life in hard work without 

 remuneration, in preference to doing that which would enable him 

 to gain wealth, and to live at ease, if not in luxury and enjoyment. 

 And certainly it must be confessed that in few departments of 

 research is there less prospect of gaining by success such rewards 

 as are generally sought for, than in the one to which we are 

 attached. 



The microscopist, like the astronomer, is ever longing to get a 

 little beyond the point at which he has already arrived. Each 

 new fact gained by research seems but to indicate the existence of 

 more and more important things beyond. Limit is reached and 

 then surmounted, but soon a new limit seems to rise from the 

 mists in the distance, towards which the worker is impelled by 

 new hopes and desires. It is this never halting progress which 

 distinguishes scientific from every other kind of inquiry, and 

 particularly microscopical investigation, for it can never be com- 

 pleted. It deals with the illimitable. The boundaries of to-day 

 are found to have vanished to-morrow, and the eyes and under- 

 standing begin to penetrate into regions which but a short time 

 before had been considered far beyond the range of possible inves- 

 tigation. 



He only who was quite ignorant of the many and great improve- 

 ments constantly being made in our methods of research, and in 

 the instruments required in investigation, would think of fixing any 

 limit to the advance of microscopical inquiry. The records of the 

 work of this Society contain many examples of progress towards 

 and advance beyond barriers regarded not very long before, and by 

 considerable authorities, as insurmountable. I well remember the 

 time when, in many branches of inquiry, it might have been truly 

 said that the optical instrument was in advance of the methods of 

 examination; when our magnifying powers were higher than we 

 could use without losing rather than gaining as regards the defini- 

 tion of delicate structure. As, however, time went on, this was 

 changed. New and improved methods of examining tissues were 

 discovered, and means adopted, by which excessively thin layers 

 could be submitted to examination, and a power of five or six hun- 

 dred diameters was no longer sufficient to enable the observer to 

 see all that it was almost certain was to be seen. These remarks 

 more particularly apply to a class of researches upon which I was 

 engaged in 1856-60, concerning the structure and arrangement 



