THE COBHAM MEETING Text and photographs by Tony Saunders-Davies, unless otherwise stated

This was the second year the Southern Group held its meetings at this venue, ably organised by Joan Bingley (seen above.)

An excellent turnout saw twenty seven members and friends attend the Church Hall at Cobham, where the meeting took its usual form of three lectures, followed by a gourmet lunch, and then an active gossip.

The first speaker was Joan Tubbs, who showed some of her superb macro shots.

Joan employs an interesting technique of cutting away part of the flower to show the beautiful structure inside.

However I think one of her best was this one of the fruiting bodies of a fungus.

Joan's photographs are all on film slides; these shots were taken off the screen with my Minolta A1, so inevitably a little quality has been lost. The originals are even more lovely, believe me!

Joan introduces the next speaker: Brian Davidson. Brian talked about Victorian microphotographs. Microphotographs are not to be confused with photomicrographs, which are taken through a microscope, whereas microphotographs are photographs reduced to microscopic size, often no bigger than a pin's head.

Brian showed a wide variety of microphotographs (all monochrome of course) displaying different aspects of Victorian life: the Royal Family, foreign places, ruins, faces, etc. Two showed aspects of natural history and technology, on the left is a picture of 'The Belfast Naturalists Club on the Giant's Causeway, 11th June 1868.' On the right is the Earl of Rosse's great 72" reflector, constructed in 1845.

I followed with a talk on rotifers, which I shall write up and upload later.

The gourmet lunch followed...

Perhaps as a consequence of this I didn't get around to covering all of the exhibits at the gossip which followed, but these are some that caught my eye:

Maurice Moss had a beautiful and instructive display of feathers. I can do no better than reproduce his notes here. There has been an intensive study of recent discoveries in China, which shows that many dinosaurs were, in fact, feathered, and their feathers show most of the features of modern bird feathers.

Above are two examples: despite the green barbs, I think the one on the left is part of a canary's feather, while the right one is a peacock feather.

Tony Jarratt showed his quite superb Grand Beck of 1884. This is one of the finest examples I have seen, and beyond it is a splendid collection of objectives, eyepieces and other accessories. Further up can be seen Tony Dutton's display of an apertometer.

Phil Greaves tells me it takes up to nine months to prepare his amber mounts. The amber in question dates from the Triassic of ninety million years ago, to the present day.

The midge on the left dates to the Triassic, so could easily have sucked the blood of dinosaurs - the idea behind the film Jurassic Park.

Dennis Fullwood (on the left) showed the Tullgren Funnel, seen here discussing it with Maurice Moss. Light is used to drive invertebrates from the soil via the funnel into a jar of preserving alcohol.

Our final picture shows Maurice Moss proposing a 'Thank you!' to the caterers, for such an excellent lunch. The food by that time had well and truly disappeared!

As usual this was a most enjoyable meeting, and I'm sure everybody will be back again next year.

Warm thanks to Joan Bingley for the flawless organisation.