The Presidents Address. 
67 
Schick in Berlin^ and Oberhauser and Chevallier in Paris. 
In Great Britain Sir David Brewster applied his great 
knowledge of optical science to the construction of 
lenses formed from precious stones, and was successfully 
followed by Dr. Goring and Mr. Pritchard, all of whom 
succeeded in constructing lenses of very short focus and great 
defining powei*. To Dr. Wollaston and Mr. Holland we owe 
the doublet and the triplet,, but it is to Mr. Joseph Jackson 
Lister that we owe the structure of a lens for object-glasses 
that could be used without spherical or chromatic aberration 
in a compound arrangement. The principle on which such 
combinations can be formed, he laid down in his celebrated 
paper which was published in the volume of the ' Philoso- 
phical Transactions ^ for 1829. But the art of making 
these glasses he has imparted to the three great English houses, 
Smith and Beck, Ross and Son, and Powell and Leal and, from 
whence they have been sent to all parts of the world. No one 
would deny the right possessed by a great discoverer, to make 
known his discoveries in the manner in which he thinks they 
are best calculated to confer benefit on society. Some years 
ago, when the ' Journal of Microscopical Science ' connected 
with our Society was started, I thought it might be beneficial 
to the public that Mr. Lister^s method of making lenses should 
be made known, and requested him to communicate it to the 
world through the Microscopical Society. He, however, de- 
clined to do so, expressing his conviction that the interests of 
science were best served by confining the art he had acquired to 
thethreefirmswhose microscopes are now so universally admired. 
The construction of these microscopes brought a host of 
observers into the field. Microscopical clubs were instituted, 
and important contributions began to be made to the science 
of life. But during all this time the older scientific societies 
of this metropolis looked on with indiff'erence, and but few 
papers appeared in their Transactions devoted to microscopic 
investigation. So remarkable was this fact, that Schleiden, 
writing in 1840, impressed with the fact that the countrymen 
of Robert Brown must be great observers, attributed the 
paucity of microscopic observations in this country to the 
want of efficient instruments. At that moment we possessed 
instruments of unrivalled excellence both in mechanical 
arrangements and the quality of their lenses. How it was 
that such instruments did so little work, is a question well 
worth the attention of the patriot and the philosopher. It 
would, I think, be found a part of that larger question, of how 
much we have sufifered as a nation by the almost systematic 
neglect of natural science as a branch of general education — a 
