PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION. 
The American chemist, usually ready to accept with alac¬ 
rity all time, labor and money saving devices, has been strangely 
backward in taking advantage of the benefits to be gained 
through the intelligent application of chemical microscopic meth¬ 
ods in the industries and in research. He has also failed to 
grasp the fact that the modern microscope is, in reality, a more 
important adjunct to his laboratory than spectrometer, polarim- 
eter or refractometer; in fact, it may be said that the micro¬ 
scope is entitled to as important a place as the analytical balance. 
No one other instrument can perform so many functions and do 
them all well. 
This curious reluctance to grasp the opportunities offered is 
the more extraordinary, when we recall that the earliest com¬ 
prehensive work dealing with microchemical methods was from 
the pen of an American — Theodore G. Wormley — whose 
classic “The Microchemistry of Poisons” appeared in 1867. 
The failure of the chemists to obtain from the microscope all 
that the instrument is capable of yielding is, perhaps, largely 
due, first, to the fact that few of them are given an opportunity 
of becoming sufficiently familiar with the instrument and its 
accessories; second, they are not aware of the great variety 
of problems which are solvable through the microscope, nor of 
the specific sort of problems for the investigation of which this 
is the instrument par excellence; third, there has been a lack of 
elementary manuals covering the field, and for this reason the 
microscope has been looked upon as an instrument peculiar to 
the biological laboratory. 
One application, if no other, should appeal to every chemist, 
that of microscopic qualitative analysis, because of its enormous 
saving of time, labor, material and space, yet with increased 
sensitiveness of tests and greater certainty of results. 
