Washington standard. [volume] (Olympia, Wash. Territory) 1860-1921, 1870-07-23
New World of Wonders-An Astonish-
ing Discovery.

LUZ HiCIUSCUpc HAS Uccu CaIleu man
sixth sense. After exhausting all the
natural powers, unaided by science, there
yet remains an unknown world of nature
to which the senses have no access. The
microscope opens this amazing creation to
our vision and we find it teeming with
organized life and beautiful forms, 10 COM
parison with which the grosser structures
seem quite imperfect.
The earth on which we tread is in many
places simply the remains Of living things
which once moved and felt the sunlight,
and died to build up world of variety
and usefulness for man in his turn to live
aud die upon. The city of Richmond is
built upon such graveyard. The chalk
cliffs of England are made Of dead infu-
soria. The rotten stone with which we
polish metals is only the shells Of minute
creatures whose day of existence was mil
lions of years ago. The dirt.eaters of
Lapland, of North Carolina, and of Cali.
fornia devour the remains of organized
life, and derive nourishment from the ami
NAL matter which has survived countless
ages for these wretched beings to feed
upon.
All these things come to us through tho
little tube upon which science has confer
red these marvellous powers; and science
is yet ceaselessly working on to results
still more surprising. The last advance,
which has just been made in this city, is
very large one. Until now the best mi
croscope magni6ed an object not more than
two hundred million times its actual size,
and very few microscopists ever saw such
power. The President of the Royal So
ciety Of England last summer showed a
shell magnifed one hundred and forty -four
million times, and this excited the aston.
ishmcnt of microscopists throughout the
world. But the new optical combination
Just completed in New York exhibits the
same object under an enlargement of nine
thousand million times its natural 'magni-
tude. If an ordinary domestic fly could
be seen entire under such masni6cation,
it would seem to cover space as large as
the whole city of New York below Wall
street. A man would appear more than a
hundred miles high, and lady's hair
would reach half way from New York to
New Haven.
This wonderful instrument is so sensi.
tive that loud word spoken near it de-
stroys all distinctness of vision, from the
trcmor impaired to it by the motion Of the
air, and a footstcp on the floor shakes it
out of adjustment. The field Of view
that is, the area which can be seen at once
lisa circle only the one twelve-thousandth
Of an inch in diameter, but it appears to
the eye to be eight inches in diameter. A
microscopic shell called an ang,latum, of
which about one hundred and forty placed
end to end will reach an inch, and which
is simply marked with lines of the most
exquisite delicacy when examined under
ordinary powerful microscopes, exhibits
under the new instrument half globes of
white silcx, whose diameters appear to be
an inch and three quarters, and Of which
only fifteen can be seen at once. In re-
atty the point of cambria needle is larger
than the circle upon which these fifteen
half globes exist, and yet that circle ap-
pears like a dessertplate covered with
lady.apples.
These wonders we have seen; but how
they are produced only men of science can
fully explain and understand. The honor
of the invention belongs to Mr.. Edward
N. Dickinson, the distinguished lawyer
and engineer of this city.-New York
Sun.