14 Miscellaneous microscope attachments and accessories.

This collection of microcope attachments and accessories includes four eyepiece holders, five lens holders, one objective case signed on cap "Smith and Beck 6 Colborn Street, London", one cork, one diaphram, one rotating aperture attachment and one wooden case enclosing three plano-convex lenses. Also 9 brass nails wrapped in paper.

These attachments and accessories come from a 15 drawer cabinet found in the Herschel family home in the 1950s. Collectively the contents of this and a similar cabinet seems to suggest that they were used by successive generations of the family to store specimens, material and apparatus for carrying out experiments. Other findings in these cabinets show that various members of the family used microscopes to study botanical and geological specimens to study among other things their structure and in some cases their polarising properties. These pieces could have belonged to any one or to all of them.