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    The Diamond Lens
    The Diamond Lens
    The Diamond Lens
    Ebook60 pages42 minutes

    The Diamond Lens

    By Fitz-James O'Brien

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateJun 1, 2004
    Author

    Fitz-James O'Brien

    Fitz-James O’Brien (1828-62) was an Irish-born American writer best known for his Gothic short stories, which are now seen as precursors of modern science fiction

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    • 4/5
      Young man fascinated by microscopy will stop a nothing to build the most powerful microscope in existence. But when he does, he sees much more than he bargained for. Very well done, in a florid 19th century sort of way.

    Book preview

    The Diamond Lens - Fitz-James O'Brien

    The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Diamond Lens, by Fitz-James O'brien

    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

    almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or

    re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

    with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

    Title: The Diamond Lens

    Author: Fitz-James O'brien

    Release Date: October 24, 2007 [EBook #23169]

    Last Updated: February 4, 2013

    Language: English

    *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DIAMOND LENS ***

    Produced by David Widger

    THE DIAMOND LENS

    By Fitz-James O'brien

    Contents

    I

    FROM a very early period of my life the entire bent of my inclinations had been toward microscopic investigations. When I was not more than ten years old, a distant relative of our family, hoping to astonish my inexperience, constructed a simple microscope for me by drilling in a disk of copper a small hole in which a drop of pure water was sustained by capillary attraction. This very primitive apparatus, magnifying some fifty diameters, presented, it is true, only indistinct and imperfect forms, but still sufficiently wonderful to work up my imagination to a preternatural state of excitement.

    Seeing me so interested in this rude instrument, my cousin explained to me all that he knew about the principles of the microscope, related to me a few of the wonders which had been accomplished through its agency, and ended by promising to send me one regularly constructed, immediately on his return to the city. I counted the days, the hours, the minutes that intervened between that promise and his departure.

    Meantime, I was not idle. Every transparent substance that bore the remotest resemblance to a lens I eagerly seized upon, and employed in vain attempts to realize that instrument the theory of whose construction I as yet only vaguely comprehended. All panes of glass containing those oblate spheroidal knots familiarly known as bull's-eyes were ruthlessly destroyed in the hope of obtaining lenses of marvelous power. I even went so far as to extract the crystalline humor from the eyes of fishes and animals, and endeavored to press it into the microscopic service. I plead guilty to having stolen the glasses from my Aunt Agatha's spectacles, with a dim idea of grinding them into lenses of wondrous magnifying properties—in which attempt it is scarcely necessary to say that I totally failed.

    At last the promised instrument came. It was of that order known as Field's simple microscope, and had cost perhaps about fifteen dollars. As far as educational purposes went, a better apparatus could not have been selected. Accompanying it was a small treatise on the microscope—its history, uses, and discoveries. I comprehended then for the first time the Arabian Nights' Entertainments. The dull veil of ordinary existence that hung across the world seemed suddenly to roll away, and to lay bare a land of enchantments. I felt toward my companions as the seer might feel toward the ordinary masses of men. I held conversations with nature in a tongue which they could not understand. I was in daily communication with living wonders such as they never imagined in their wildest visions, I penetrated beyond the external portal of things, and roamed through the sanctuaries. Where they beheld only a drop of rain slowly rolling down the window-glass, I saw a universe of beings animated with all the passions common to physical life, and convulsing their minute sphere with struggles as fierce and protracted as those of men. In the common spots of mould, which my mother, good housekeeper that she was, fiercely scooped away from her

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