Read Weird and Witty Tales of Mystery for Free Online Page A

acromatic condensers, white cloud illuminators, prisms,
parabolic condensers, polarizing apparatus, forceps, aquatic boxes,
fishing-tubes, with a host of other articles, all of which would have
been useful in the hands of an experienced microscopist, but, as I
afterwards discovered, were not of the slightest present value to me.
It takes years of practice to know how to use a complicated microscope.
The optician looked suspiciously at me as I made these wholesale
purchases. He evidently was uncertain whether to set me down as some
scientific celebrity or a madman. I think he inclined to the latter
belief. I suppose I was mad. Every great genius is mad upon the subject
in which he is greatest. The unsuccessful madman is disgraced and
called a lunatic.
    Mad or not, I set myself to work with a zeal which few scientific
students have ever equalled. I had everything to learn relative to the
delicate study upon which I had embarked,—a study involving the most
earnest patience, the most rigid analytic powers, the steadiest hand,
the most untiring eyes, the most refined and subtile manipulation.
    For a long time half my apparatus lay inactively on the shelves of my
laboratory, which was now most amply furnished 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 microscopic,—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 labours, 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
"nomads" 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 Mr. 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
microscopes of immeasurable power, with which I seemed to pierce
through 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
poor microscopist finds himself continually stumbling! I felt convinced
that the simple microscope, composed of a single lens of such vast yet
perfect power was possible of construction. To attempt to bring the
compound microscope up to such a pitch would have been commencing at
the wrong end; this latter being