So singular is the position of the Telescope and the Microscope among
the great inventions of the age, that no other process but that which
they embody could make the slightest approximation to the secrets which
they disclose. The steam-engine might have been imperfectly replaced
by an air or an ether-engine; and a highly elastic fluid might have
been, and may yet be, found, which shall impel the “rapid car,” or
drag the merchant-ship over the globe. The electric telegraph, now so
perfect and unerring, might have spoken to us in the rude “language
of chimes;” or sound, in place of electricity, might have passed along
the metallic path, and appealed to the ear in place of the eye. For
the printing-press and the typographic art might have been found a
substitute, however poor, in the lithographic process; and knowledge
might have been widely diffused by the photographic printing powers
of the sun, or even artificial light. But without the telescope and
the microscope, the human eye would have struggled in vain to study
the worlds beyond our own, and the elaborate structures of the organic
and inorganic creation could never have been revealed.--_North-British
Review_, No. 50.