![]() While there is no surviving example of this exact design, close relatives of this type do exist, made either completely of brass or of ivory with brass pillars. There, Withering indicated this microscope was developed for field dissections of flowers and other plant parts. The earliest reference to a small botanical microscope of Withering’s design appeared in the first edition of this book. Inspired by the taxonomical work and systematic classification of Carl Linnæus (1707-1778), Withering (1776) applied the Linnaean taxonomical system of classification to British plants in a seminal, two volume work, A Botanical arrangement of all the vegetables naturally growing in the British Isles. ![]() William Withering (1741-1799), an English physician and botanist who graduated with a degree in medicine 1766 in Edinburgh. The “Withering-type Microscope” is named for its inventor, Dr. A rare item for the collector.Withering-type botanical microscope, 1780 ![]() A date of 1890 or so would seem about right. This example has part of its wooden case and was supplied by Watson and Sons, which helps date it as Watson became 'and Sons' in 1883 and later 'and Sons Ltd' in 1903. Maltwood passed his scale onto the microscope manufacturers Smith & Beck of London, who photographed it and subsequently produced the hand numbered Maltwood Finder slides. Starting with a piece of paper that was ten inches squared, Maltwood painstakingly divided this into 1/50th inch squares and wrote latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates in each 1/5th square inch (a total of 38,400 numbers!). A friend of Maltwood suggested that he draw a larger scale which could then be photographed with the negatives scaled down and printed onto glass squares. Unfortunately, ruling lines at such a small scale proved to be too difficult for accurately finding positions at a high magnification. In his account, he describes an initial attempt to draw a grid onto paper that was stuck to a glass slide. One of the earliest references to a finder slide dates back to 1858 and was invented by Thomas Maltwood, who published his work in the Transactions of the Microscopical Society of London. ![]()
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