Page 3 - hl-Smith&Beck

With the publication of a very favourable review in the April 1861 edition of The
Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science [4], continued interest in the slides was
assured. At the beginning of their report the editors, Edwin Lankester and George Busk,
said:

Messrs. Smith and Beck having sent us up a selection from the transparent injected
preparations which they now have on sale, we feel we should be doing a service to our
readers by calling attention to them. We believe these preparations are not made in this
country; but from whatever part of the world they are obtained, they claim the merit of being
the most successfully mounted microscopic preparations that have yet been offered to the
public for sale.

Throughout the three-page review of the slides their enthusiasm is obvious. In the
commentary on the preparations of The Nervous System, they observe:

… in these preparations the principle part of the structure elucidated is the distribution of the
smaller blood vessels. It is, in fact, in the extraordinary delicacy of the injections that one of

the great merits of these preparations exists. (Fig. 3)
In describing the preparations of the The Eye:

The whole series devoted to the eye are exceedingly delicate and beautiful,

and concerning the preparations of Organs of Respiration they continue:

The lungs afford a very fine opportunity to the maker of these preparations, and in the
perfection of the injection of the vascular network in the air-cells we have seen no better
illustration than these.

The report concludes:

Here in these few slides we have a perfect museum of histological structures, and the
student with these in hand and his microscope can form a better idea of the nature of an
organ, and the functions it possesses, than if he spent years amongst preparations in spirits.

The editors offered Beck several suggestions. These included having the mounts
made up using standard 3x1in glass slides, and printing the specimen details on the
labels in English rather than in Latin. On the evidence of surviving mounts, this latter
suggestion was adopted almost immediately, but oversized slides continued to be used
for some years. There is mention of the “clumsy size” of the slides in the literature, with
remedies suggested from total remounting to trimming down using a diamond and board
[5] (Fig. 5F). Eventually Beck did begin to provide these preparations on the standard
3x1in slips (Figs. 5B-E), although the date of that introduction has not been determined.

Also in April 1861, a report on the meeting of the Manchester Literary and
Philosophical Society on the 15th enthused [6]:

3 Originally published in the Winter 2012 Quekett Journal of Microscopy, Issue 41, pages 701-712

Republished with permission in Micscape Magazine, March 2016
www.micscape.org