A few years ago my grandson, Connor, now aged 10½, commented to his mum, “I love being with Grandad because he knows so much about everything and you know you can talk to him about everything ... and stuff!”

How important it is to be knowledgeable about stuff! After all knowledge is really an ordered collection of relevant stuff.

I was eleven when the microscope arrived, a gift from a great uncle. Tall, elegantly turned from brass, the microscope was a relic from a bygone age.

The companion oaken box was full of stuff with which the Victorians would have both intrigued and bored to death guests who dared ask, “I say, just what sort of stuff can you look at with this magnificent instrument?”

Oh the slides! Hair of a bat, skin of dogfish, wing of a Monarch butterfly, cockchafer’s antennae, lining of a lung and ash from Krakatoa’s 1883 eruption. My life changed with that microscope.

Four hundred and eighty years before, in 1665, Robert Hooke gazed through his primitive microscope at the cellular structure of a piece of cork. This closer look at nature was to change the concept and understanding of our world forever. Blood and tissue, plants and rocks revealed their structures and secrets to the microscope. Diseases were isolated as collections of bacterial rods, tubes and blobs.

Over the next few years I was to discover lots of stuff. I became increasingly more curious about the interrelationship of things. Why were leaves green in the summer yet turned brown and ‘died’ in the Winter? Why does compost compost? This led to an interest in geology, botany and other natural history stuff.

All this was 50 years ago. The microscope now sits on a shelf, an attractive ornament to be admired. But, despite that, it played a part in opening my eyes to the natural world and in no small way influencing my future directions. National Parks and conservation became my career. I have seen so many marvellous things on this planet with its bountiful variety of life. There is so much I haven’t seen but I know it’s there and that it is important.

“Yes, I have a pair of eyes, and that’s just it. If they wos a pair o’ patent double million magnifyin’gas microscopes of hextrapower, p‘raps I might be able to see through a flight o ‘stairs and deal door; but bein’ only eyes, you see my wision’s limited.”
Charles Dicken’s Sam Weller

We may not have super high vision eyes but with our eyes we can perform a myriad of functions. We can see, focus, discern, examine and select, compare, inspect, distinguish, and contrast. Taking time to take a closer look has led to creation of national parks, and conservation of wildlife and plants. A closer look has led to the discovery of new medicines, many based on what nature can provide.

Next time you venture out into the outdoors try using your eyes like a microscope, excite your curiosity and take a closer look at the other world around you. We are not alone. Our world is full of wondrous things ... and stuff.

 

Dave Wakelin