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

  • Woodruff, Lorande Loss, 1879-1947.
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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    [Reprinted from The Scientific Monthly, September, 1918.] BAKER ON THE MICROSCOPE AND THE POLYPE By Professor LORANDE LOSS WOODRUFF YALE UNIVERSITY HE transactions of learned societies during the eighteenth century are replete with microscopical observations in stigated directly or indirectly by the pioneer work of Hooke and Grew in England, Leeuwenhoek and Swammerdam in Hol¬ land, and Malpighi in Italy. In particular, Leeuwenhoek’s long series of letters, published year after year chiefly in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, re¬ vealed an undreamed-of microcosm beyond the ken of unaided vision and turned the attention of the “ Ingenious and Curious,” the philosopher and dilettante, to the slowly developing micro¬ scope as a source of pleasure or fame. Among the English dis¬ ciples of Leeuwenhoek, it was Henry Baker, of London, on whom seems to have fallen the Dutch microscopist’s mantle— though, it is true, considerably reduced. Baker was born in London on May 8, 1698, and began his career at an early age as a bookseller’s apprentice. In 1720 he undertook to tutor a deaf and dumb child and with such success that he established a private school in London for deaf mutes. His course of instruction comprised speech and lip reading, writing and drawing, but the essential point of his system, which unfortunately he felt constrained to keep a secret, was that, after the preliminary training, he took his pupils on rambles about London and instructed them by conversation on the events of everyday life with which they came in contact. Baker realized a considerable fortune from his school, and the success of his method brought him to the attention of Daniel Defoe, who in 1728 became associated with him in founding the Universal Spectator and Weekly Journal. The following year Baker married Defoe’s youngest daughter, Sophia, who bore him two sons. He survived both his wife and children, his sole heir being a grandson. After Baker’s death on November 25, 1774, the Royal Society established the Bakerian Lecture with a fund given by him for discourses on “ anatomical or chymi- cal” subjects. Baker’s first essay as an author was “The Invocation of