Originally Posted by
r.e.
Of course slides of algae/plankton are still made. Why wouldn't they be? I would think that anybody who's training to be a marine biologist has made them. Indeed, living in New York City I could easily do it myself if I still owned a microscope and wanted to. That's the whole point. There are apparently collectors of slides, and not just of diatoms, made in the Victorian era despite the ready availability of contemporary slides. As I said above, there are websites for collectors of 19th century slides (not, I might add, just from England), and evidently an active market for them, including on eBay.
I gather, as @Tin Pan suggests, that it's a hobby, and I can see how it's of historical interest, especially for people who are interested in how science was done in the 1800s. It was the era of the gentleman scientist, an historical phenomenon that among other things produced Charles Darwin. Arthur Cottam, who made the slides that Allesandro is photographing, was a government clerk, probably aided financially by his businessman father, but also a member of the Royal Astronomical Society, membership in which wasn't just a matter of paying an annual fee. He's part of an historical phenomenon, and a social class, that doesn't exist anymore.
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