This beautiful Cuff-style microscope may well have been made by famous Ausburg scientific instrument maker Georg Brander in the late eighteenth century. The microscope is part of the Royal Microscopical Society collection and has been described in detail by Gerard Turner in his excellent book The Great Age of the Microscope.

The overall execution of the microscope strongly resembles the design published by John Cuff in 1743, with few exceptions. The base is made of Oak and ornately styled with two drawers to hold accessories and objectives, an improvement over the common single-drawer style. The body tube is made of a combination of brass and nicely finished lignum-vitae. Focusing is accomplished by a slight deviation from the Cuff design, using a screw assembly attached to the pillar for fine focusing and by screwing the entire body into its holding clamp for coarse focus. The eye lens fits into a brass holder at the top of the body tube and objectives screw into the nosepiece. A cruciform-shaped stage is drilled and threaded for a number of accessories and contains a small magnifier for examination and illumination of opaque specimens. The substage mirror is concave, and fits onto a brass foot that extends across the base to add support for the microscope.

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