What Eyes Would Be …

Microscopes from the 17th to 19th Centuries

looking through the microscope

In his popular how-to guide of 1858, Half Hours with the Microscope, the British naturalist Tuffen West extolled the virtues of the microscope as a tool through which anyone could gain knowledge of the physical world. "What eyes would be to the man born blind," he wrote, "the microscope is to the man who has eyes."

During the second half of the 17th century, scientists were beginning to see the world anew through the lenses of their microscopes and to describe their discoveries in beautifully illustrated (and now extremely rare) books, a number of which are owned by the Ewell Sale Stewart Library. Their discoveries —through these volumes— fundamentally changed our understanding of life on earth.

By the middle of the 19th century, microscopes had become more widely available, and were used as a popular form of entertainment in many middle class households. Unlike the earlier, hand-printed volumes which were available to a very small group of scholars, the books chosen to represent this later period were inexpensively produced and widely distributed. Their titles, One Thousand Objects of the Microscope, Marvels of Pond Life, and Half Hours with The Microscope, suggest the popular nature of microscopic investigation enjoyed by the general public at the time. They were published at a time when the Academy's Microscopical Section was formed and when microscopes made the leap from the scientific laboratory to the parlor, appealing to people of all ages and from all walks of life. As the author of The Naturalist's Notebook observed in 1867:

"The aquarium, the fern-case, and the microscope, are taking the place of tops, marbles, and Skelt's halfpenny sheets of characters among our children, while we have found new and cheerful amusements for our leisure hours."

This online exhibit presents the following:

—Robert McCracken Peck Curator of Art and Artifacts

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