Firstly, please be patient with this page, there are 27 images here. It will take time to load. A strew from Bissex Hill, Barbados. Looks to be by John T Norman and dated 1866.
Huge range of material, diatoms and others, all over the slide. The slide mentions Asterolampra vulgaris, ornata, ralfsiana, rylandsiana, brightwelliana, marginata, Hemiaulus sp.. However there’s loads more. I found Liostephania (over a dozen different ones), Brightwellia johnsonii fragments (>5), Brightwellia another species fragment, and lots and lots and lots of others….. This is one of the those slides where something new could be found pretty much every time it is looked at. In the images, I have put a name to what I think is in the middle of each one, but most of these should be considered tentative IDs.
Olympus BHB microscope using 450nm LED light. 20x Nikon Plan Apo NA 0.65 objective. Olympus Aplanat Achromat condenser, brightfield lighting. 2.5x Nikon CF PL photoeyepiece. Monochrome converted Nikon d850 camera. Single images only (no stacking). Each image is 734µm x 489µm (there’s a scale bar in the first one but not the others). I am showing these at reduced resolution (1600 pixels wide) just to help the page load, but the originals are 8256×5504.
This is a hugely interesting slide to view, but not to photograph. I couldn’t use my preferred 40x and 63x Pl Apo objectives, as the coverslip is really thick. As such I was limited to the 20x which impacted resolution (yes, I could use my 50x NA 1.0 water immersion Leitz objective with its long working distance, but the image quality is not the much better than the 20x Nikon). Assuming it is by JT Norman and was made in 1866 it is also historically interesting and one of the oldest slides I have.
Oh, and if anyone has any Bissex Hill material or slides I’d love some more examples to image (hint, hint)…..