## Plates for the Efsays on the Microfcope by George Adams

There is often some confusion concerning George Adams, author of Essays on the Microscope, since his father also bore this name and was also an author of a work on Microscopy as well as being a Scientific Instrument Maker.
To distinguish between the two the terms 'elder' and 'younger' have been adopted.
George Adams, the elder, was born in 1704, founded a Scientific Instrument workshop in 1735 at 'The Sign of Tycho Brahe's Head, Fleet Street'. He published a volume 'Micrographia Illustrata' in 1746 (this ran to 4 editions). He died in 1773.
George Adams, the younger, was born in 1750 and died on 17th August 1795. He took over the Instrument business when his father died and took the business to new heights, becoming Instrument maker to George III and Optician to The Prince of Wales.
Upon the demise of George Adams, the younger, all manuscripts and instrumentation were bought by William and Samuel Jones (W. & S. Jones). It is from this acquisition that the second edition of the Essays came about.
Quite how many illustrations from Adams's work are original (to either Adams, elder and younger) is difficult to define. Certainly he culled plate images from various works of the time and also from his fathers work 'Micrographia Illustrata'.
An example of this concerns the plates depicting Hydra. The images for this plate are copies of elements of the plates from an earlier work "MEMOIRES, POUR SERVIR A L'HISTOIRE D'UN GENRE DE POLYPES D'EAU DOUCE, A BRAS EN FORME DE CORNES" by Abraham Trembley published in 1744 (Memoirs concerning the history of a form of freshwater polyp with arms shaped like horns). These illustrations were taken by Adams from his fathers publication Micrographia Illustrata published in 1746.
Take for example the looping motion of the Hydra. This is depicted in Adams's Plate 21 Figures 16 through 24 (below).
Compare this to Trembley's Plate 3 (below)
It is not immediately apparent that the illustrations are the same and indeed it could be argued that since Hydra are observed to move in this way anyone might come up with the illustrations independantly. However, when the images are ordered in a like manner (there are the same number)
and then their mirror images formed
then it becomes quite clear that the images were originally Trembley's.
Adams's Plate again for comparison.
If this is not convincing then compare the next two images. The first is from Plate 21 of Adams and the second Trembley's Plate 5.
As can be seen Adams's illustration is an exact mirror image of Trembley's Plate 5 image.
Many of the other illustrations concerning this organism were also used.
There is also a remarkable similarity between an illustration of a Cuff microscope in Henry Bakers 'Employment for the Microscope' (1744) and Plate 7A in Adams. See the two images below:-
The similarity may well be to do with the John Cuff leaflet that accompanied these instruments, describing its parts.

Many of the figures that were produced in this volume were reproduced (for the next 50 years) in various publications and attributed to Adams.
Four such plates (from The Encyclopaedia Brittanica 1797 and 1810 Editions) are reproduced here and should be compared to the Adams plates. Note how the images are mirror images of the originals. This is because they have been faithfully copied from the printed image and not from the original plates. The annotation characters on these have, however, remained the same.
The New Royal Encyclopaedia by William Henry Hall also uses the illustrations stating 'Copied by Permission from Mr. Adams's Essays on the Microscope'.

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