Address / by Sir William Turner.

  • William Turner
Date:
[1900?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Address / by Sir William Turner. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    9/36 (page 5)
    preservation of the whole. The organs are, as it were, special machines situated in the general building which constitutes the factory or body of the individual. But, further, each organ or special machine is itself formed of tissues which possess different properties. Some, as the blood¬ vessels, nerves, fibrous tissues, &c., are generally distributed throughout the animal body, whilst others, as bones, muscles, cartilage, &c., are found only in certain definite localities. Whilst Bichat had acquired a definite philosophical conception of the general principles of construction and of the distribution of the tissues, neither he nor his pupil Beclard was in a position to determine the essential nature of the structural elements. The means and appliances at their disposal and at that of other ob¬ servers in their generation were not sufficiently potent to complete the analysis. Attempts were made in the third decennium of this century to improve the methods of examining minute objects by the manufacture of com¬ pound lenses, and, by doing away with chromatic and spherical aberra¬ tion, to obtain, in addition to magnification of the object, a relatively large flat field of vision with clearness and sharpness of definition. When in January 1830 Joseph Jackson Lister read to the Boyal Society his memoir ‘ On some properties in achromatic object-glasses applicable to the improvement of microscopes,3 he announced the principles on which combinations of lenses could be arranged, which would possess these qualities. By the skill of our opticians, microscopes have now for more than half a century been constructed which, in the hands of competent observers, have influenced and extended biological science with results comparable to those obtained by the astronomer through improvements in the telescope. In the study of the minute structure of plants and animals the observer has frequently to deal with tissues and organs, most of which possess such softness and delicacy of substance and outline that, even when micro¬ scopes of the best construction are employed, the determination of the intimate nature of the tissue, and the precise, relation which one element of an organ bears to the other constituent elements, is in many instances a matter of difficulty. Hence additional methods have had to be devised in order to facilitate study and to give precision and accuracy to our observations. It is difficult for one of the younger generation of biologists, with all the appliances of a well-equipped laboratory at his command, with experienced teachers to direct him in his work, and with excellent text-books, in which the modern methods are described, to realise the conditions under which his predecessors worked half a century ago. Laboratories for minute biological research had not been constructed, the practical teaching of histology and embryology had not been organised, experience in methods of work had not accumulated ; each man was left to his individual efforts, and had to puzzle his way through the complica tions of structure to the best of his power. Staining and hardening