This microscope was in Howes’s possession as early as 1915 when he used it in his childhood bedroom “laboratory.” This laboratory was wonderfully equipped and grew so large that he eventually converted an unused building on the family farm into his own Maplewood Museum of Natural Sciences. Howes used this microscope for many decades at the Bruce Museum, and very likely gave it toward the end of his life to his good friend, the naturalist and conservationist John Ripley Forbes. It returned to the Bruce Museum when Forbes donated it in 1985, a year after Howes’s death.
Paul Howes photographic self-portrait in his home laboratory, Stamford, CT in 1915.
