1876] | Microscopy. 121 
Michels in the last November number of the Popular Science Monthly. 
The essential parts of a microscope-stand are simplified and combined 
with great ingenuity and judgment. The form of stand is essentially 
that of the pocket microscopes of Swift and some other London makers, 
in which a single inclined bar, resting on the table at its lower end and 
supported by two legs near its upper end, carries firmly and conveniently 
the mirror, stage, and compound body. The blackened paper tube which 
serves as body is large enough to receive a good ocular or eyepiece at 
the top, and contains at the bottom a society-screw adapted to hold any 
objectives that may be chosen. It slides through a wooden tube lined 
with cloth, giving a good coarse adjustment. This wooden tube is glued, 
by means of an intervening piece of wood, to the main inclined bar of 
the stand. The stage is of wood, or gutta-percha modeled into shape 
while warm, also attached by means of a block of wood, and the object 
slide is held in position by elastic india-rubber bands. The mirror and 
its immediate mounting is that of a common student’s stand. This 
instrument stands nearly fifteen inches high when in use, weighs one 
pound, and can be packed within a space fourteen by three and a half by 
three inches. It is perhaps the best amateur microscope that can be 
made at the present time by a student of average mechanical skill. One 
reason why it is the best is because it contemplates the use for all its 
optical parts of first-class professional work ; for we cannot quite agree 
With its author that there is no reason why the student should not make 
his own lenses, Objectives have reached a degree of excellence which 
has quite outgrown the skill of an ordinary amateur. True, Mr. Wenham 
can make lenses of surpassing excellence, and so could Mr. Spencer, while 
still unlearned in the science and unpracticed in the art of microscopy, 
but such instances are so rare as not to compromise the accuracy of the 
Statement that amateurs cannot make as good lenses as they can buy. 
Nor do we think that the author does full justice to the recent progress 
achieved (though still too little) by the regular makers in the way of 
furnishing good and useful work at an available price. What is called 
first-class apparatus is still prohibitively costly, and much of the cheap 
Work is more than correspondingly poor ; yet instruments can now be 
bought at a reasonable cost that would not be fairly described as charac- 
terized by “ diminutive size, smallness of field, poor light, shortness of 
tube; absence of society’s screw, and other evils” which “ will soon cause ” 
: “to be cast aside.’ Nor do we share the author’s difficulty in find- 
mg lenses in this country which he can specially recommend. Most of 
our distinguished makers now prepare not only lenses of excessively high 
angle and price, but also lenses of exquisite workmanship, moderate 
angle, simple mounting, and available price ; lenses which we recommend 
with double pleasure because of our strong faith in the utility of mod- 
erate angles for general use, and our firm belief that the perhaps neces- 
