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I passed all the other courses that I took at my University, but I could have never pass botany. This was because all botany students had to spend several hours a week in a laboratory looking through a microscope at plant cells, and I could never see through a microscope. I never once saw a cell through a microscope. This used to enrage my? instructor. He would wander around the laboratory pleased with the progress all the students were making in drawing the involved and, so I am told, interesting structure of flower cells, until he came to me. I would just be standing there. I cant see anything, I would say. He would begin patiently enough, explaining how anybody can see through a microscope, but he would always end up in a fury; claiming that I could too see through a microscope but just pretended that I couldnt. It takes away from the beauty of flowers anyway, I used to tell him. We are not concerned with beauty in this course, he would say. We are concerned solely with what I may call the mechanics of flars. Well, Id say. I cant see anything. Try it just once again, hed say, and I would put my eye to the microscope and see nothing at all, except now and again a nebulous milky substance.----a phenomenon of maladjustment. You were supposed to see a vivid, restless clockwork of sharply defined plant cells. I see what looks like a lot of milk, I would tell him. This, he claimed, was the result of my not having adjusted the microscope properly, so he would readjust it for me, or rather, for himself. And I would look again and see milk. I finally took a deferred pass, as they called it, and waited a year and tried again. (You had to pass one of the biological sciences or you couldnt graduate.) The professor had come back from vacation brown as a berry, bright-eyed, and eager to explain cell-structure again to his classes. Well, he said to me, cheerily, when we met in the first laboratory hour the semester, were going to see cells this time, arent we? Yes, sir, I said.