Water

Triszan Moore

February 15, 2002

Biology 101

The compound light microscope is used for examining small or thinly sliced sections of objects under magnification that is higher than that of the binocular dissecting light microscope. The term light refers to the method by which light transmits the image to your eye. Compound deals with the microscope having more than one lens. Microscope is the combination of two words. “Micro” meaning small and “scope” meaning view. Microscopes in early times, like Leeuwenhoek's, were called simple because they only had one lens. The compound microscope was created by the Janssens. This creation helped to advance the field of microbiology many years ahead of where it had been only just a few years earlier. The Janssens added a second lens to magnify the image of the primary lens.

The compound light microscope consists of many parts. Parts’ enabling the microscope to magnify as high as 400 times an objects normal size. There are two magnification values of interest to the microscopist. They are the optical magnification and the actual magnification. The optical magnification