The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Diamond Lens, by Fitz-James O'brien

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Title: The Diamond Lens

Author: Fitz-James O'brien

Release Date: October 24, 2007 [EBook #23169]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE DIAMOND LENS

By Fitz-James O'brien

I

FROM a very early period of my life the entire bent of my inclinations
had been toward microscopic investigations. When I was not more than
ten years old, a distant relative of our family, hoping to astonish my
inexperience, constructed a simple microscope for me by drilling in a
disk of copper a small hole in which a drop of pure water was sustained
by capillary attraction. This very primitive apparatus, magnifying some
fifty diameters, presented, it is true, only indistinct and imperfect
forms, but still sufficiently wonderful to work up my imagination to a
preternatural state of excitement.

Seeing me so interested in this rude instrument, my cousin explained to
me all that he knew about the principles of the microscope, related to
me a few of the wonders which had been accomplished through its agency,
and ended by promising to send me one regularly constructed, immediately
on his return to the city. I counted the days, the hours, the minutes
that intervened between that promise and his departure.

Meantime, I was not idle. Every transparent substance that bore the
remotest resemblance to a lens I eagerly seized upon, and employed
in vain attempts to realize that instrument the theory of whose
construction I as yet only vaguely comprehended. All panes of
glass containing those oblate spheroidal knots familiarly known as
"bull's-eyes" were ruthlessly destroyed in the hope of obtaining lenses
of marvelous power. I even went so far as to extract the crystalline
humor from the eyes of fishes and animals, and endeavored to press
it into the microscopic service. I plead guilty to having stolen the
glasses from my Aunt Agatha's spectacles, with a dim idea of grinding
them into lenses of wondrous magnifying properties--in which attempt it
is scarcely necessary to say that I totally failed.