The feeling of the spot is one of almost complete isolation from the world below, and a neighbourhood to something startling if not almost terrible. Like Fatima in Bluebeard’s Tower, impelled by an overbearing curiosity, we turn the lock of the centre door, and enter the chamber. A strange sight is presented. The room is large, with the sloping roof-beams above, and a stained and uncovered floor below. The walls all round are crowded with shelves, covered with bottles of various sizes full of the queerest-looking of all queer things. Many are of a bright vermilion colour; others yellow; others brown; others black; whilst others again display the opaque whiteness of bloodless death. Three tables are in the room, but these are as crowded as the walls. Cases of instruments, microscopes, tall jars, cans, a large glass globe full of water-newts, hydras, and mosses; small cases of drawers filled with microscopic objects, and a thousand other odds and ends. Here is a long coil of snake’s eggs, just brought from a country stable-yard; there some ears of diseased wheat, sent by a noble landlord who studies farming; beside them lies part of a leaf of the gigantic water-lily, the Victoria Regia, and near that a portion of a vegetable marrow is macerating in a saucer to separate some peculiar vessels for exhibition under the microscope. There are two windows to the room, besides some ventilators in the roof; and before one of these, where the light is best, are ranged microscopes complete and ready for use, and round about them all sorts of scraps of glass and glaziers’ diamonds, and watch-glasses, and forceps, and scissors, and bottles of marine-glue, and of gold-size,—these being the means and appliances of the microscopic observer. Before the second window is a sink, in which stand jars of frogs and newts, and other small creatures. A lathe, a desk, and writing utensils, the model of a whale cast ashore in the Thames, an old stiff-backed wooden chair, once the seat of the Master of the Worshipful Company of Surgeons, a few cases of stuffed birds and animals, and some tall glass-stoppered bottles that went twice round the world with Captain Cook and Dr. Solander, make up the catalogue of the chief contents of an apartment, which, at first glance, has the look of an auctioneer’s room filled with the sold-off stock of a broken down anatomical teacher. A closer inspection, however, shows that though there is so great a crowd of objects, there is little or no confusion, and the real meaning of the place, its intention, and labours, reveal themselves.