Baker on the microscope and the polype / by Professor Lorande Loss Woodruff.

  • Lorande Loss Woodruff
Date:
[1918]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Baker on the microscope and the polype / by Professor Lorande Loss Woodruff. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Before this Treatise is concluded, it will not perhaps be thought un¬ profitable to examine some of the finest and most exquisite Performances of human Art, and compare them with the Productions of Nature; as such a Comparison must tend towards humbling the Self-conceit and Pride of Man, by giving him a more reasonable and modest Opinion of himself; and at the same time may in some Degree conduce towards im¬ proving his imperfect Conceptions of the Supreme Creator. . . . The Use of the Microscope will naturally lead a thinking Mind to a Consideration of Matter, as fashioned into different Figures and Sizes, whether Animate or Inanimate: it will raise our Reflections from a Mite to a Whale, from a Grain of Sand to the Globe whereon we live; thence to the Sun and Planets; and, perhaps, onwards still to the fixt Stars and the revolving Orbs they enlighten, where we shall be lost amongst Suns and Worlds in the Immensity and Magnificence of Nature. Although the proportion of Baker’s own observations is relatively very small, the work is far from being merely an ex¬ cellent compilation, as it is permeated throughout with the spirit of a man who is a constant, enthusiastic devotee of microscopic study and who is acquainted first hand with a large part of the material he is presenting. The success of “The Microscope Made Easy” led Baker to publish ten years later his “ Employment for the Microscope,” which is practically a supplement to the second part of his first book—and after 1753 the two works were usually sold together under the title “ Baker on the Microscope.” This second volume is largely a compilation of Baker’s own studies of animalcules from various sources and here we find a Suctorian figured for the first time, apparently Podophrya quadripartita, as well as a number of other hitherto undescribed organisms. Baker, like Joblot, makes an attempt to give more or less appropriate names to the various organisms which he describes but he does not apply a binomial nomenclature or classify them—Dr. John Hill, during the previous year, being the first to give animal¬ cules definite Latin names (e. g., Paramecium) and to arrange them in groups, under the influence of the rapid advances in taxonomy at the time. Although Baker’s studies on microscopic organisms have been emphasized above, apparently he himself and the Royal Society were more pleased with his studies, presented at length in this volume, which he had been making for above ten Years past, on a great variety of Saline Bodies, Mineral, Vegetable and Animal, as well as many other Substances, both simple and compound, whose Parts can be dissolved in Fluids, after a Method which has never hitherto been described by any Author, or practised before my¬ self by any body that I have heard of. And tho' I have found their orig¬ inal Particles undiscoverable by any Microscope, the Time I hope has not been wholly misemployed; since I have been enabled, by the help of that
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