[Wavytone]

You may be surprised if it captures his imagination. Your budget should buy a nice one.

My parents were utterly clueless unscientific arty farty types but gave me a cheap japanese "hobby" one when I was 8 along with an instruction book and a book about the microscopic world.

This had two eyepieces and objectives upto 400X, had a concave condenser mirror underneath for illumination (a desk lamp is fine, sunlight may fry the subject), and a bunch of pre-prepped slides as well as a dangerously sharp scalpel, tweezers and clean slides and very thin glass covers for DIY efforts. Needless to say there were a few minor cut fingers and breakages, and I recall buying some more with hard-earned pocketmoney at age 10.

It really did work, though fairly dim at 400X as I recall, having fairly primitive (by modern standards) and uncoated optics. Anything modern should be pretty good in comparison.

The dozen or so prepped slides had things like pollen, a hair, butterfly wing, a slice of a plant stem, a few dead bugs - flea and dust mite as I recall.

It didn't take long before I was making samples of grass and other plants, pond water with things swimming around in it, my own blood and so-on. In high school a few years later I discovered the geology lab had a diamond saw for slicing stones; equipped with a flat grinding stone and some polishing compound it was fairly easy to make samples for the microscope.

Kept it for years, lots of interest for me.