hed with every possible
contrivance for facilitating my investigations. The fact was that I did
not know how to use some of my scientific implements--never having been
taught microscopies--and those whose use I understood theoretically were
of little avail until by practice I could attain the necessary delicacy
of handling. Still, such was the fury of my ambition, such the untiring
perseverance of my experiments, that, difficult of credit as it may
be, in the course of one year I became theoretically and practically an
accomplished microscopist.

During this period of my labors, in which I submitted specimens of every
substance that came under my observation to the action of my lenses, I
became a discoverer--in a small way, it is true, for I was very young,
but still a discoverer. It was I who destroyed Ehrenberg's theory that
the _Volvox globator_ was an animal, and proved that his "monads" with
stomachs and eyes were merely phases of the formation of a vegetable
cell, and were, when they reached their mature state, incapable of
the act of conjugation, or any true generative act, without which no
organism rising to any stage of life higher than vegetable can be said
to be complete. It was I who resolved the singular problem of rotation
in the cells and hairs of plants into ciliary attraction, in spite of
the assertions of Wenham and others that my explanation was the result
of an optical illusion.

But notwithstanding these discoveries, laboriously and painfully made
as they were, I felt horribly dissatisfied. At every step I found
myself stopped by the imperfections of my instruments. Like all active
microscopists, I gave my imagination full play. Indeed, it is a common
complaint against many such that they supply the defects of their
instruments with the creations of their brains. I imagined depths beyond
depths in nature which the limited power of my lenses prohibited me from
exploring. I lay awake at night constructing imaginary micro-scopes
of immeasurable power, with which I seemed to pierce through all the
envelopes of matter down to its original atom. How I cursed those
imperfect mediums which necessity through ignorance compelled me to
use! How I longed to discover the secret of some perfect lens, whose
magnifying power should be limited only by the resolvability of the
object, and which at the same time should be free from spherical and
chromatic aberrations--in short, from all the obstacles over which the