It’s as though what he’d seen went back to unseen. Even scholars fell away from microscopic life, so by the 1730s, when the Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus decided to classify all life, he dumped all of van Leeuwenhoek’s very different animalcules into the phylum Vermes (for worms), genus Chaos (meaning formless). What didn’t I say? What could I have said better? Why does wonder not excuse itself?įor whatever reason, Yong reports, van Leeuwenhoek’s discoveries, so exciting at first, gradually faded from public memory. When I write these little essays, or go on the radio, when I come upon something I didn’t know, something that gives me that ohmygod feeling that pushes me to learn, to tell, to exclaim, and when I rush to a friend and gush it all out and am met by a patient pair of eyes asking, “Are we done here? Can we get back to lunch?” I feel, not just deflated, but mystified. This mood surprises him-more than surprises it seems to hurt. Van Leeuwenhoek wondered about this out loud: “ver and above all, most men are not curious to know nay, some even make no bones about saying, What does it matter whether we know this or not?” So the world is filled with teeny somethings, they’d say. “Not one man in a thousand is capable of such study, because it needs much time and spending much money.” His excitement, he noticed, didn’t sink in with the broader population. “eside myself in our town there are no philosophers who practice this art … ” His neighbors, he felt, were more interested in making money or chasing success. He’d done all this on “impulse and curiosity alone,” he wrote the society. But here and there, Yong found another theme: a brooding disappointment. His letters seem almost breathless with discovery-and with joy. As science historian Douglas Anderson wrote, “Almost everything he saw he was the first human ever to see.” Most of what Van Leeuwenhoek saw had never been seen before. In the older gentlemen, he found “an unbelievably great company of living animalcules, a-swimming more nimbly that any I had ever seen up to this time … seemed to be alive.” These dental studies are among the first ever observations of living bacteria. Van Leeuwenhoek took a live eel and a couple of microscopes and spent two hours with the czar gazing at blood rushing through the capillaries of the eel’s tail. He would have come on his own, his servants said, but he worried that appearing on the streets of Delft might cause a commotion, so he asked van Leeuwenhoek to grab a couple of samples and join him on board. One day in the spring of 1698, two foreign gentlemen knocked on his door and announced that the czar of Russia, Peter the Great, was at that very moment waiting on board his royal ship in the nearby River Schie, hoping to meet the shopkeeper. Gradually, the invisible world he described began to find an audience. But he did send affidavits from a Dutch public notary, a barrister, and his local minister. Van Leeuwenhoek wouldn’t send them his microscopes he was jealous of his craft. ” (Hello, microbe we now call a protist!)Īccording to the science writer Leonard Mlodinow, who also tells van Leeuwenhoek’s story in his new book, when the Dutch shopkeeper’s letters were read to the society’s members, some were intrigued. In another letter, he describes a roundish critter that “stuck out two little horns which were continuously moved, after the fashion of a horse’s ears. I must say, for my part, that no more pleasant sight has ever come before my eye than these thousands of living creatures, seen all alive in a little drop of water. And that made all the difference.ĮNot at all: “. But most of all, and unlike most of his neighbors, he wanted to see he was a deeply curious man. For its day, it was the best microscope in the world-ten times more powerful than any other. In his spare time, he got good at grinding lenses, so he made himself an eyeglass that could magnify 270 times. He wasn’t a scholar, a philosopher, or a scientist. All at once, sometime in the early 1670s, one man took the first deep dive into our microbial world. What would that be like? Would you be frightened? Mystified? Joyous? You don’t know what to call them, but you’re the first Earthling ever to see what the overwhelming majority of creatures on our planet look like, and for a little while, you’re the only one-the only one who could gaze down at the sweep of nature’s magnificence. You look in a pond, in a puddle, on your skin, even at the plaque between your teeth, and they’re there too-in different shapes, with different moves, but uncannily, unmistakably alive. What if, popping into view in the strangest places, you could suddenly see moving, dancing, spinning creatures where you’d never seen them before? You look in a bucket of water-there they are.
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