The Crisp Collection of Microscopes

Abstract

MAY I add a note to the brief statement referring to the Crisp collection of microscopes in NATURE of February 14, p. 241? Doubtless it is true that on occasion the late Sir Frank Crisp may have led the authorities to believe that he contemplated leaving his collection to the Science Museum at South Kensington, but it is equally true that his chief desire was to see his collection used for the preparation of a comprehensive history of the microscope in amplification of Mayall's Cantor Lectures, printed in 1886. Some years ago he asked me whether I would be willing to compile such a history, and he gave me a few notes on his instruments for the purpose. Last week I received a letter from my friend Prof. Poulton, in which he recalled a conversation with Sir Frank Crisp. “I remember his telling me that he did not know what to do with it (the collection), and I tried to persuade him to leave it to the Pitt Rivers Museum. If the collections now in the Old Ashmolean had been there, then I expect he would have left it to Oxford”. This I believe to be the truth. Sir Frank Crisp did not desire to duplicate the series in the possession of the Royal Microscopical Society, or that his collection should be merged in a larger one, and only be partly exhibited. But the facts that many of the parts of the instruments have got mixed, that historic examples have been divorced from their history, that the collection has been distributed without having been properly catalogued, is an international calamity.