Apart from a few outstanding people from before 1850, British women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who published work in the chemical sciences have not received much attention so far. The university-trained women who, from about 1880 onwards, authored or co-authored an increasing number of original research contributions have been largely ignored, and their names are for the most part omitted from biographical reference works and science histories. There are several works describing the changes and developments in university-level education for women during this period, but these are not specially concerned with science education or with the careers of individuals.

What sort of activities took place in the academic laboratories developed for teaching the natural sciences in Britain between the 1860s and 1880s? What kind of social and instrumental regimes were implemented to make them meaningful and efficient venues of experimental instruction? As humanly constructed sites of experiment how were the metropolitan institutional contexts of these laboratories engineered to make them legitimate places to study ‘Nature’? Previous studies have documented chemists' effective use of regimented quantitative analysis in their laboratory teaching from the 1820s, but less is known about how Victorian academics made other sorts of laboratories unproblematic pedagogical spaces. This paper will examine the literary, disciplinary and instrumental technologies of microscopy deployed by T. H. Huxley at his South Kensington laboratory during the early 1870s to render his biology teaching legitimate, meaningful and efficient. As such it is a response to Pickstone's recent call for a broader account of microscopy teaching in late nineteenth-century academic life science, and one localized answer to Bennett's enquiries as to what the appearance of a microscope in laboratories and other domestic settings betokened to historical actors, and how such tokens changed over time.