Challenger sat at the centre table with the electric light illuminating the slide under the
microscope which he had brought from his dressing room.
No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a
microscope might scru- tinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.
-Expedient of the Pocket Compass and
Microscope.- A Messenger From Lisa.- Motives for Pressing Forward.
He stayed, however, in apparent contentment for six days, playing with a
microscope and a notebook in one of the many sparsely furnished sitting-rooms, but on the evening of the seventh day, as they sat at dinner, he appeared more restless than usual.
I could see distinctly the limbs of these vermin with my naked eye, much better than those of a European louse through a
microscope, and their snouts with which they rooted like swine.
He speaks of "help for the sight far above spectacles and glasses," also "glasses and means to see small and minute bodies perfectly and distinctly, as the shapes and colours of small flies and worms, grains and flaws in gems, which cannot otherwise be seen." To-day we have the
microscope. He says "we have also means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances," yet in those days no one had dreamed of a telephone.
[19] The cavities leading from the fleshy compartments of the extremity, were filled with a yellow pulpy matter, which, examined under a
microscope, presented an extraordinary appearance.
I was all tuckered out tryin' to mislead 'em and deceive 'em and sidetrack 'em; but the minute I got where I wa'n't put under a
microscope by day an' a telescope by night and had myself TO myself without sayin' `By your leave,' I begun to pick up.
He owes me seven pounds at the moment, and he pawned his
microscope last week, because he was so broke."
The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted and that the elixir of life is a chimera but these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the
microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles.
Farebrother, one day that the Vicar came to his room with some pond-products which he wanted to examine under a better
microscope than his own, and, finding Lydgate's tableful of apparatus and specimens in confusion, said sarcastically--
When the doctor's four guests heard him talk of his proposed experiment, they anticipated nothing more wonderful than the murder of a mouse in an air pump, or the examination of a cobweb by the
microscope, or some similar nonsense, with which he was constantly in the habit of pestering his intimates.