The microtomist's vade-mecum : a handbook of the methods of microscopic anatomy / by Arthur Bolles Lee.

Date:
1890
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The microtomist's vade-mecum : a handbook of the methods of microscopic anatomy / by Arthur Bolles Lee. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    to the reasons for this—perhaps apparently excessive—catho- licity of treatment. Doubtless a large proportion of the formulie given are quite superseded in modern practice; but that is not a sufficient reason for rejecting them. The inclu- sion of all of them is justified by the consideration that some one or other of them may perhaps serve, in some way that cannot now be foreseen, to suggest some new method of value. Let me give an example. Who, ten years ago, would have thought that the formula of Blanchard’s ‘ Liqueur saline hydrargyrique ’ deserved reprinting in a treatise on histologic technic ? Yet it is to the disinterment of that forgotten formula by Lang that we owe the establishment of corrosive sublimate as one of the most useful fixing agents in the arsenal of the microtomist. Or who would have deemed Thiersch’s lilac borax-carmine (Formula No. 80a), published in 1865, to be of greater importance than any other stain till then made known ? Yet that formula it was that directly suggested Woodward’s admirable aqueous borax-carmine, and through this, if I am not mistaken, the aqueous and the alcoholic borax-carmines of Glrenacher, the latter of which is now to be found on the table of every embryologist. All my abstracts and translations have been made from the original sources, except where it has been impossible for me to obtain sight of these. Eeferences to the sources are given in all cases; but I desire here to make special acknow- ledgment of the great assistance rendered me by the Jour- nal of the Eoyal Microscopical Society—in many respects the best-edited periodical known to me. G-eneva (Switzerland) ; February, 1885.