Victorian-era microscope slides

In August 2016, the San Diego Natural History Museum (theNAT) opened the Eleanor and Jerome Navarra Special Collections Gallery, a new permanent space dedicated to showcasing the holdings of its research library and rare book room. The core exhibition of the new space, “Extraordinary Ideas from Ordinary People: A History of Citizen Science,” uses library collections to highlight the role of amateur naturalists in the history of science. One of the displays features a selection of Victorian-era microscope slides. Amidst a craze for popular science in the late 19th century, microscopes became commercially available. Suddenly, anyone who could afford a microscope could be a citizen scientist, mounting specimens to glass slides or buying pre-made slides displaying everything imaginable—tiny pieces of plants, shells, insects, fossils, crystals. More here