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Welcome to Joseph Leidy's 'Fresh-Water Rhizopods of North America' -- on-line*

Don't know who Joseph Leidy was? Wonder what 'Fresh-Water Rhizopods of North America' is all about? Read this Micscape article about the man and his book to get an orientation.

Haven't visited the 'Joseph Leidy Microscopy Portal'? See the link at the bottom of this page to do so.

Book Navigation -- it's easy!:

You can turn the page, or go back a page, by clicking the 'Next Page -->' and '<-- Previous Page' links.

Click on 'TOC' and you'll find yourself at the 'Table Of Contents' (which actually starts at page 'ix' of the book) Click on 'Index', and you'll find yourself at the first page of the four page index (which happens to be page 321 of the book)

See those strange strings of page numbers?:

"i-1-10-20-30-40-50-60-70-80-90-100-110-120-130-140-150-160-170-180-190-200-210-220-230-240-250-260-270-280-290-300-310-319"

It's a string of hyperlinks. Click on one and you go to that page. Click on the one nearest to the page you really want and you'll be within at most 5 pages of your target. Then use the 'Next' and 'Prev' links to zero-in.

At this point, you can click on 'Next' to see page 'i' and start browsing the book from front to back, or click on one of the many links to jump where you find it more useful to start. The 'Plates' link will get you to a thumbnail overview of the famous 48 Plates & Keys of the book.

That's pretty much it. I hope you'll find this resource useful.

If this is your first time, you might start by looking at some of the Plates -- they are wonderful.

Note: This page, and the 'Plates' thumbnail page, do not, of course, appear in the actual book. Also, there are blank 'separator' pages in the book that have no number but do take up a slot in the page number sequence. These were, obviously, not scanned, but don't let the missing page numbers throw you. I have not missed any 'real' pages. For instance, there is no page 22. That's because it is a blank page separating the 'Introduction' from the greater body of the book. Another example: there is no page 320 for the same reason -- it's a blank separator page.

My target output device is the monitor (at either 72 dpi, or 96 dpi), so following the 1.5 to 2 factor rule, I scanned at 150 dpi hoping to record all the detail needed for these two monitor resolutions. Careful comparisons between the actual plates and the scanned 150 dpi images for three 'test' plates (Plates 10, 43, and 47) seemed to do so.

2. Cropped to just contain the real contents of each plate (there is a quite of bit of empty space on either side and at the bottom of the originals) -- ending up with about a 7.4 x 10.3 inch area of the plate

Note: The images are slightly skewed because that is the way they are on the original plates -- just a slight skewing as presented on the background paper.

3. Then, the Extensis Intellihance 3.0 filter was applied (with settings: 'Autodescreen', 'Snappy 'contrast, 'Balanced Tone' Brightness, 'Medium' Saturation, 'Remove Cast', 'No Sharpening', and 'Despeckle Overall'.).

Note: You have to realize that the plates are 127 years old and they have degraded to some extent -- so I -hope- I have produced something close to the original plates and useful to those using the microscope to try to see what Leidy saw.

4. Saved as a JPEG (Baseline optimized, with Quality = 5, a medium setting, but it seemed to reproduce all the detail that was there).

Note: This produces a very nice image of about 1100 x 1550 pixels in size, with a stored size of around 300 - 700 KB (Gee, I hope I have enough space for 48 of these things! ;-) ).

I realize all this is a compromise, but I did do a number of comparison tests between the original TIFF image, the Extensis filter applied and not applied, and various JPEG storage modes, to find the best way to proceed. I really could not find any image degradation in the JPEG vs. TIFF test images (Plates 10, 43, and 47) even when examined at 200% magnification.

Of course, printing on a regular printer (at 300 dpi) will produce an image half the size of the original, but again, my goal was to allow people to see, on their computer monitor, as Leidy's printers rendered his drawings in chromolithography.

As for the 'Keys' for each plate, the 'Index', 'Introduction', and 'Conclusion', they were also scanned at 150 dpi, grayscale, but stored as JPEG immediately, then cropped for best fit, and the Extensis filter applied pretty much as above. The goal here was readability with an emphasis on minimum file size (JPEG, Baseline optimized at Quality = 3).