ABSTRACT
A few 18th-century workers, such as Hill, used cochineal as a stain. Leonard Hill also invented the microtome and used microincineration of plant sections to increase contrast. The use of stains was just beginning to be accepted, and received its real impetus not from scientific work as such, but from the sale of preparations for the growing number of amateur microscopists; visibility of the specimen was paramount for such a purpose. From about 1840 a vast number of slides was produced, and many still survive to illustrate the development of staining. Saffron was used by Leeuwenhoek in 1714 to color muscle fibers. Such a use repeated nowadays shows that it would not have been very effective. It seems that Reichel used logwood, in simple unmordanted solution, to stain plant tissues. Hill introduced cochineal, and both hematoxylin and carmine remain in use even today.
