Now it must be observed concerning this method of inquiry that it could never be final; it is incompetent by deficiency.  Its results could never be exhaustive until the life-histories of the organisms involved were known.  And further, although it is a legitimate method of research for partial results, and was of necessity employed, yet it requires precise and accurate manipulation.  A thousand possible errors surround it.  It can only yield scientific results in the hands of a master in physical experiment.  And we find that when it has secured the requisite skill, as in the hands of Prof.  Tyndall, for example, the result has been the irresistible deduction that living things have never been seen to originate in not-living matter.  Then the ground is cleared for the strictly biological inquiry, How do they originate?  To answer that question we must study the life histories of the minutest forms with the same continuity and thoroughness with which we study the development of a crayfish or a butterfly.  The difficulty in the way of this is the extreme minuteness of the organisms.  We require powerful and perfect lenses for the work.  Happily during the last fifteen years the improvement in the structure of the most powerful lenses has been great indeed.  Prior to this time there were English lenses that amplified enormously.  But an enlargement of the image of an object avails nothing, if there be no concurrent disclosure of detail.  Little is gained by expanding the image of an object from the ten-thousandth of an inch to an inch, if there be not an equivalent revelation of hidden details.  It is in this revealing quality, which I shall call magnification as distinct from amplification, that our recent lenses so brilliantly excel.  It is not easy to convey to those unfamiliar with objects of extreme minuteness a correct idea of what this power is.  But at the risk of extreme simplicity, and to make the higher reaches of my subject intelligible to all, I would fain make this plain.

But to do so I must begin with familiar objects, objects used solely to convey good relative ideas of minute dimension.  I begin with small objects with the actual size of which you are familiar.  All of us have taken a naked eye view of the sting of the wasp or honey bee; we have a due conception of its size.  This is the scabbard or sheath which the naked eye sees.[3] Within this are two blades terminating in barbed points.  The point of the scabbard more highly magnified is presented, showing the inclosed barbs.  One of the barbs, looked at on the barbed edge, is also seen.  Now these two barbed stings are tubes with an opening in the end of the barb.  Each is connected with the tube of the sac, C. This Is a reservoir of poison, and D is the gland by which it is secreted.  Now I present this to you, not for its own sake, but simply for the comparison, a comparison which struck the earliest microscopists.  Here is the scabbard carefully rendered.  One