infocus #15 September 2009 Charles Darwin and Robert Brown - their microscopes and the microscopic image

DOI: 10.22443/rms.inf.1.48

Microscopes were important to many Victorian scientists. Once the brass and glass instruments fitted with achromatic lenses were in vogue, high-resolution optical microscopy would become easily available – but what about microscopy prior to that? There was much useful investigation carried out with microscopes using just a single magnifying lens, indeed many of the fundamental revelations in the biological sciences were made possible by these unsophisticated instruments.