otherwise have ascertained the existence, the physiologist has not yet
derived any great benefit from the instrument."

These are only specimens of the manner in which the microscope and its
results were generally regarded by the generation just preceding our own.

I have referred you to the proper authorities for the account of those
improvements which about the year 1830 rendered the compound microscope
an efficient and trustworthy instrument. It was now for the first time
that a true general anatomy became possible. As early as 1816 Treviranus
had attempted to resolve the tissues, of which Bichat had admitted no
less than twenty-one, into their simple microscopic elements. How could
such an attempt succeed, Henle well asks, at a time when the most
extensively diffused of all the tissues, the areolar, was not at all
understood? All that method could do had been accomplished by Bichat and
his followers. It was for the optician to take the next step. The
future of anatomy and physiology, as an enthusiastic micrologist of the
time said, was in the hands of Messrs. Schieck and Pistor, famous
opticians of Berlin.

In those earlier days of which I am speaking, all the points of minute
anatomy were involved in obscurity. Some found globules everywhere, some
fibres. Students disputed whether the conjunctiva extended over the
cornea or not, and worried themselves over Gaultier de Claubry's
stratified layers of the skin, or Breschet's blennogenous and
chromatogenous organs. The dartos was a puzzle, the central spinal canal
a myth, the decidua clothed in fable as much as the golden fleece. The
structure of bone, now so beautifully made out,--even that of the teeth,
in which old Leeuwenhoek, peeping with his octogenarian eyes through the
minute lenses wrought with his own hands, had long ago seen the "pipes,"
as he called them,--was hardly known at all. The minute structure of the
viscera lay in the mists of an uncertain microscopic vision. The
intimate recesses of the animal system were to the students of anatomy
what the anterior of Africa long was to geographers, and the stories of
microscopic explorers were as much sneered at as those of Bruce or Du
Chailly, and with better reason.

Now what have we come to in our own day? In the first place, the minute
structure of all the organs has been made out in the most satisfactory
way. The special arrangements of the vessels and the ducts of all the
glands, of the air-tubes and ve