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In the late 1950s, in our Andhra University at Vizagh, I had to mug up lots of stuff about compound microscopes...the air-filled and the oil-filled objectives, their magnifying and resolving powers, various eyepieces like the Kellner, the Ramsden and the Huyghens, their uses, advantages and disadvantages and stuff.
But, other than the traveling one, I never looked into any other microscope. This, in spite of the fact that I had my didi at home and several friends doing their medicine and talking about their biological (and pathological and histological) microscopes, staining, gram positive and gram negative (gram for Hans Christian Gram, as I learned later on), dyes with frightening names like eosin and bacteria like Bacillus, Listeria, Staphylococcus, Streptococcus, Enterococcus, and Clostridium
It is as well, I suppose, as I would have had James Thurber's complaint, which I can now fully appreciate since I am now a one-eyed jack of spades.
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I passed all the other courses that I took at my university, but I could never pass botany. This was because all botany students had to spend several hours a week in a laboratory looking through a microscope at plant cells, and I could never see through a microscope. I never once saw a cell through a microscope. This used to enrage my instructor. He would wander around the laboratory pleased with the progress all the students were making in drawing the involved and, so I am told, interesting structure of flower cells, until he came to me. I would just be standing there. “I can't see anything,” I would say. He would begin patiently enough, explaining how anybody can see through a microscope, but he would always end up in a fury, claiming that I could too see through a microscope but just pretended that I couldn't. “It takes away from the beauty of flowers anyway,” I used to tell him. “We are not concerned with beauty in this course,” he would say. “We are concerned solely with what I may call the mechanics of flowers.” “Well,” I'd say, “I can't see anything.” “Try it just once again,” he'd say, and I would put my eye to the microscope and see nothing at all, except now and again, a nebulous milky substance—a phenomenon of maladjustment. You were supposed to see a vivid, restless clockwork of sharply defined plant cells. “I see what looks like a lot of milk,” I would tell him. This, he claimed, was the result of my not having adjusted the microscope properly; so he would readjust it for me, or rather, for himself. And I would look again and see milk.
http://www.wou.edu/~khes/geog106h/thurber.pdf
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In the late 1950s, in our Andhra University at Vizagh, I had to mug up lots of stuff about compound microscopes...the air-filled and the oil-filled objectives, their magnifying and resolving powers, various eyepieces like the Kellner, the Ramsden and the Huyghens, their uses, advantages and disadvantages and stuff.
But, other than the traveling one, I never looked into any other microscope. This, in spite of the fact that I had my didi at home and several friends doing their medicine and talking about their biological (and pathological and histological) microscopes, staining, gram positive and gram negative (gram for Hans Christian Gram, as I learned later on), dyes with frightening names like eosin and bacteria like Bacillus, Listeria, Staphylococcus, Streptococcus, Enterococcus, and Clostridium
It is as well, I suppose, as I would have had James Thurber's complaint, which I can now fully appreciate since I am now a one-eyed jack of spades.
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
I passed all the other courses that I took at my university, but I could never pass botany. This was because all botany students had to spend several hours a week in a laboratory looking through a microscope at plant cells, and I could never see through a microscope. I never once saw a cell through a microscope. This used to enrage my instructor. He would wander around the laboratory pleased with the progress all the students were making in drawing the involved and, so I am told, interesting structure of flower cells, until he came to me. I would just be standing there. “I can't see anything,” I would say. He would begin patiently enough, explaining how anybody can see through a microscope, but he would always end up in a fury, claiming that I could too see through a microscope but just pretended that I couldn't. “It takes away from the beauty of flowers anyway,” I used to tell him. “We are not concerned with beauty in this course,” he would say. “We are concerned solely with what I may call the mechanics of flowers.” “Well,” I'd say, “I can't see anything.” “Try it just once again,” he'd say, and I would put my eye to the microscope and see nothing at all, except now and again, a nebulous milky substance—a phenomenon of maladjustment. You were supposed to see a vivid, restless clockwork of sharply defined plant cells. “I see what looks like a lot of milk,” I would tell him. This, he claimed, was the result of my not having adjusted the microscope properly; so he would readjust it for me, or rather, for himself. And I would look again and see milk.
I finally took a deferred pass, as they called it, and waited a year and tried again. (You had to pass one of the biological sciences or you couldn't graduate.) The professor had come back from vacation brown as a berry, bright-eyed, and eager to explain cell-structure again to his classes. “Well,” he said to me, cheerily, when we met in the first laboratory hour of the semester, “we're going to see cells this time, aren't we?” “Yes, sir,” I said. Students to right of me and to left of me and in front of me were seeing cells; what's more, they were quietly drawing pictures of them in their notebooks. Of course, I didn't see anything.
“We'll try it,” the professor said to me, grimly, “with every adjustment of the microscope known to man. As God is my witness, I'll arrange this glass so that you see cells through it or I'll give up teaching. In twenty-two years of botany, I—” He cut off abruptly for he was beginning to quiver all over, like Lionel Barrymore, and he genuinely wished to hold onto his temper; his scenes with me had taken a great deal out of him.
So we tried it with every adjustment of the microscope known to man. With only one of them did I see anything but blackness or the familiar lacteal opacity, and that time I saw, to my pleasure and amazement, a variegated constellation of flecks, specks, and dots. These I hastily drew. The instructor, noting my activity, came back from an adjoining desk, a smile on his lips and his eyebrows high in hope. He looked at my cell drawing. “What's that?” he demanded, with a hint of a squeal in his voice. “That's what I saw,” I said. “You didn't, you didn't, you didn’t!” he screamed, losing control of his temper instantly, and he bent over and squinted into the: microscope. His head snapped up. “That's your eye!” he shouted. “You've fixed the lens so that it reflects! You've drawn your eye!”
http://www.wou.edu/~khes/geog106h/thurber.pdf
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