delightful old Ambroise Pare. His picturesque descriptions and
bold figures are as good now as they ever were, and his book can never
become obsolete. But listen to what John Bell says of the microscope:

"Philosophers of the last age had been at infinite pains to find the
ultimate fibre of muscles, thinking to discover its properties in its
form; but they saw just in proportion to the glasses which they used, or
to their practice and skill in that art, which is now almost forsaken."

Dr. Bostock's work, neglected as it is, is one which I value very highly
as a really learned compilation, full of original references. But
Dr. Bostock says: "Much as the naturalist has been indebted to the
microscope, by bringing into view many beings of which he could not
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