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120 THE AMERICAN NATURALIST. [VOL. XXXII. 
are less certain in their meaning than they were twenty or thirty 
years ago. Who can tell to-day what a writer means if he mentions 
some fact about Acer saccharinum? One must first be acquainted 
with the mental composition of the author; is he radical or is he 
conservative in his make-up? 
We can suggest no better business for the American Association 
for the Advancement of Science than the appointment of a com- 
mittee to take the initiative in reopening this whole question of laws 
of nomenclature, and in the appointment of such a committee care 
should be taken that morphologists and physiologists as well as 
systematists should be recognized in its make-up. It would be desir- 
able to see if it be not practicable to institute some law of limitation 
to the priority rule, or there will always be those who will write Asta- 
cus when they refer to the lobster. Such a committee could cooperate 
with other similar bodies appointed by other scientific organizations 
elsewhere, and thus make some laws of universal application. 
Marvelous Technique. — At various times during the past year 
the daily papers have contained accounts of a wonderful discovery 
on the part of an alleged American professor to the effect that he 
had been able to increase the magnifying power of the microscope 
to an extent hardly dreamed of by other workers. So long as these 
accounts were confined to the daily press we took no notice of them, 
but now that they have obtained entrance into such a worthy journal 
as the New York Medical Times we think it time to lodge a protest. 
The “ discovery ” is in effect the insertion of a second microscope in 
the place of the ocular of the first. It is true that this will result in 
an amplification of the image, but every tyro knows that this process 
is an old one, and that, while an enlargement results, there is no gain 
in definition ; it is merely a magnification of the imperfections of the 
first objective. Still greater amplification than any this so-called 
professor claims can be obtained by the simple projection micro- 
scope, but no one who has seen a nucleus thus “thrown up” until 
the image has a diameter of six or eight feet will claim that the 
process discloses features before invisible. 
The same brilliant discoverer announces also a still more brilliant 
discovery in technique by which he has been able to obtain sections 
“of about one one-hundredth the thickness of the finest slice ever 
hitherto obtained.” For refinement of technique his procedure 
“beats the Dutch.” “I cemented upon a glass slide a single layer 
of cells, and then placed upon this slide another slide whose surface 
had been freshly covered with cement and allowed them to remain in 
