APPENDIX. 



I. — On the Use of the Miceosoope in Botanical Reseaeches. 



The Microscope is a most important instrument in education, and it 

 is essential for the due understanding of the structiire and physiology 

 of plants. The study of the microscopical structure of organised 

 bodies is termed Histology (istos, a web or tissue, and Xoyog, discourse). 

 Dr. Carpenter remarks : — " The universe which the microscope brings 

 under our ken seems as imbounded in its limit as that whose remotest 

 depths the telescope still vainly attempts to fathom. Wonders as 

 great are disclosed in a speck of whose miinuteness the mind can 

 scarcely form any distinct conception, as in the most mysterious of 

 those nebulse whose incalculable distance baffles our hopes of attaining 

 a more minute knowledge of their constitution. And the general 

 doctrines to which the labours of microscopists are manifestly tending, 

 in regard to the laws of organisation and the nature of vital action, 

 seem fuUy deserving to take rank in comprehensiveness and import- 

 ance with the highest principles yet attained in physical or chemical 

 science. It is by pursuing, by the aid which the microscope alone 

 can afford to his visual power, the history of the organic germ, from 

 the simple and homogeneous form which seems common to every kind 

 of living being — either to that complex and most heterogeneous 

 organism which is the mortal tenement of man's immortal spirit, or 

 only to that humble Protophyte or Protozoon, which lives, and grows, 

 and multiplies, without showing any essential advance upon its em- 

 bryonic type, that the physiologist is led to the grandest conception 

 of the unity and all-comprehensive nature of that creative design, of 

 which the development of every individual organism, from the lowest 

 to the highest, is a separate exemplifioation, at once perfect in itself 

 and harmonious with every other." 



The microscope (fiix^og, small, and exowiu, I see) is an instrument 

 for enabling the eye to see distinctly objects which are placed at a 

 very short distance from it, or to see minute objects that would other- 

 wise be invisible. It has been used with great success in the 

 examination of vegetable structure. To it we are indebted for a 

 knowledge of the various vessels and cells which enter into the com- 



