The late Dr. Barnard, President of Columbia College, had in his possession a copy of the device borne by the seal of Columbia College, New York, executed for him by M. Dumoulin-Froment, within a circle less than three one-hundredths of an inch in diameter, "in which are embraced four human figures and various other objects, together with inscriptions in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, all clearly legible. In this device the rising sun is represented in the horizon, the diameter of the disk being about three one-thousandths of an inch. This disk has been cross-hatched by the draughtsman in the original design from which the copy was made; and the copy shows the marks of the cross-hatching with perfect distinctness. When this beautiful and delicate drawing is brought clearly out by a suitably adjusted illumination, the lines appear as if traced by a smooth point in a surface of opaque ice." Lardner, in his book on the "Microscope," published in 1856, gives a wood cut which shows the first piece of engraving magnified 120 diameters, but he said that he was not at liberty to describe the method by which it was done. As happens in almost all such cases, however, the very secrecy with which the process was surrounded naturally stimulated others to rival or surpass it, and Mr. N. Peters, a London banker, turned his attention to the subject and soon invented a machine which produced results far exceeding anything that M. Froment had accomplished. On April 25, 1855, Mr. Farrants read before the Microscopical Society of London a full account of the Peters machine, with which the inventor had written the Lord's Prayer (in the ordinary writing character, without abbreviation or contraction of any kind), in a space not exceeding the one hundred and fifty-thousandth of a square inch. Seven years later, Mr. Farrants, as President of the Microscopical Society, described further improvements in the machine of Mr. Peters, and made the following statement: "The Lord's Prayer has been written and may be read in the one-three hundred and fifty-six thousandth of an English square inch. The measurements of one of these specimens was verified by Dr. Bowerbank, with a difference of not more than one five-millionth of an inch, and that difference, small as it is, arose from his not including the prolongation of the letter _f_ in the sentence 'deliver us from evil'; so he made the area occupied by the writing less than that stated above."