BASTIN-BULLOCH MICROSCOPE

DATES: 1888-?

First pictured in The Western Druggist, Vol IX, No 12, 1887, this is one of the Bulloch microscopes, like the 'New Student' stand which did not appear in Bulloch's Catalogs. It was subsequently noted in the American Monthly Microscopical Journal of February 1888, and also in the Journal of the RMS. It combines the typical Bulloch features of an asymmetrical Y-shaped foot and swinging mirror with axis in the plane of the specimen, with the parallel linkage fine focusing popularized by Gundlach, Seibert, Lietz, Zeiss and others. Coarse focusing is by sliding the tube. There is a wheel of apertures disk built into the underside of the stage. Like many of Bulloch's stands, the mirror tailpiece can be rotated so that the mirror is above the stage, to illuminate opaque objects. According to the 'Western Druggist,' these scopes were 'manufactured on the order of the publishers of the Western Druggist' which implies they were also the distributers for these stands. This scope was supposedly developed for pharmacognosists (pharmacists who worked with medicinal plants). I have not identified a surviving example of this stand to date.