342 THE NORTHERN MICROSCOPIST. 
NN 
in regard to mechanical and optical appliances (most of which 
have been exhibited at our meetings) to prove that great progress 
is being made in the designing, manufacture, and application of the 
Microscope. Improved stands and eye-pieces, new immersion 
lenses, stages, and swinging substages, more effective fine move- 
ments and elaborate accessory apparatus of all kinds, indicate not 
only the activity of mind and the abundance of the resources of 
the microscopical optician, but that these things are really required 
in a progressive science, 
It is to be hoped that the possession of excellent instruments 
and convenient apparatus will incite many of the Fellows to under- 
take more careful researches into the minute details of organic 
nature, or amongst the very fascinating rocks which are being so 
beautifully cut and mounted by petrologists. It is true that the 
difficulty of getting upon a path of original research is very 
deterrent. The activity of Continental and American microscopists 
is indeed great, and it is always necessary, before committing one- 
self to any statement, to search and prove its originality. Much 
microscopical research is quite beyond the powers of the man who 
has other avocations, and to whom the instrument is a pleasing, 
and none the less important, toy. Consider the paraphernalia 
required to study the microscopy of the details of a minute animal. 
It has to be put into hardening and water-absorbing solutions, 
then to be cut with microtomes, perhaps frozen in the first instance, 
then to be put into other solutions to be cleared and to have its fat 
got rid of, and then it has to be coloured once, twice, or thrice, 
and possibly to have some colour discharged. Finally it has to be 
mounted in a medium. It is necessarily somewhat deterrent for a 
modest microscopist to read the excessively pronounced opinions 
of manipulators, about the nature of the structure they discover in 
such complicated and altered organic matter, and to find that very 
contradictory opinions are published by different investigators about 
the nature of identical structures which have been differently 
prepared. It appears to many an amateur, who happens to in- 
vestigate structures by disturbing their natural condition as little 
as is possible, that he is, as it were, out of the field. He may find 
it necessary, even in examining the simplest section, to pay especial 
care to the illumination and centering, and to the application of 
particular powers. He is, of course, conscious of inferiority, when 
he knows that somebody merely puts a chemically treated specimen 
under an objective without the least care about optics, and finds 
out, or thinks he finds out, the truth. But there are numerous 
opportunities for original research still to be met with in the 
structure of many of the commonest invertebrates and plants. 
The study of rocks is in its infancy, and there are many very 
interesting physical questions yet to be determined, and which can 
