On Universal Microscopic Admeasurement

摘要

The student who confines himself to English books, and shuts his eyes and ears to everything German, French, or Italian, will hardly have experienced any trouble or annoyance from the fact that, in describing a microscopical object, our continental neighbours universally employ a measurement which is as strange to us as their language, and expressed in terms of the value of which we have no experience. As now used, the dimensions of objects require translation as much as the language in which the description is written, with the disadvantage that the translation is not so readily made, or the power of translating so easily applied. We may suppose that the description of a minute object, be it diatom, insect, or mould, is written, as it always should be, in Latin; the measurements, however, though expressed sometimes in Latin, are more commonly read from a standard which is to us practically unknown.