Genre:

News-Commentary, Drollery

Subjects:

Lecturing, Zoology, Anatomy, Microscopy

    Reports that the Lord Mayor of London (John Musgrove) recently gave a conversazione that featured displays of the feet of spiders, flies, and frogs, and of human skin, magnified by microscopes. Praises the mayor for showing 'such an intelligent preference for science in the abstract' but worries that the customisation of such a scientific duty might lead to such consequences as a 'Professor Owen chief magistrate' becoming the 'best exponent of the dainty', or 'Lord Mayor Erasmus Wilson being called upon to display human skin. An adjoining paragraph, entitled 'Another Account', suggests that the display is not new to the Greenwich Pensioners, since whilst the mayor magnifies the legs of only spiders and flies, the pensioners magnify the full-blooded native cockroach.