Even though we moved from Travis County to Hays County, I maintain a City of Austin Public Library card because one branch is very convenient on the way home from grocery shopping. Browsing the life sciences stacks around Dewey Decimal 570, I found The Hidden Beauty of the Microscopic World by James Weiss. I renewed it twice. It was easy enough to flip through the pictures. Then, I made the time to read the story.
The Hidden Beauty of the Microscopic World is a picture book but the author does deliver an informative narration, nicely balanced between technical correctness and common readability without the gee-whiz and golly of so much populist science. Weiss shares his own diary of discoveries.
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| The Hidden Beauty of the Microscopic World by James Weiss. London: Watkins Press, 2021. |
Weiss says little about himself, other than he was living in Poland and on a very limited budget when he took an active interest in the microscopic world. I infer that he was at university and this new hobby was an extension of his classwork because he credits professors in the frontispiece. He gathered up his zlotny and bought himself a binocular microscope and began his new journey.
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| Laxodes karyorelictea |
Weiss collected samples from ponds, streams, and the Vistula river, and from trees, soils, and other places around. In addition, he kept a tank of water into which he put many of his samples after photographing them. From that he also harvested targets for study as the ecosystem developed and evolved.
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| Lacrymaria olor |
As Weiss honed his methods he settled into a presentation style. Except for the subject displayed, the pictures all look very much alike. Paramecium, euglena, or tardigrade, everything is very green and sometimes a little out of focus away from the center. There are few opposite contrast dark lightings and no stains.
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| Paramecium at top is infected with bacilli. That kind of symbiosis may be the source of our mitochondria. |
Darks are an old technique that reveal other features of the object by passing less light through them. I discovered the same thing at age ten with my own Tasco microscope: use the back of the mirror as the reflector. Somewhere in a box is a snapshot of a salt crystal taken with my mother’s Kodak 828 Pony.
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| Must show a Tardigrade, of course. |
James Weiss served as a writer and researcher for the MicroCosmos channel on YouTube which ran from 2019 through 2024.
They produced 346 videos and attracted over 900,000 subscribers and even sold their own brand of binocular microscope and a soundtrack before closing up and moving on.
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