Anton van Leeuwenhoek

In the 1660's the members of the English Royal Society were greatly stirred by a letter from a modest but reliable observer in Holland. It announced that the writer, peering through microscopes fashioned by his own hands, had discovered a vast number of "little animals" in rain water. These "living atoms," or "animalcules," as he called them, were tiny; several thousand would fill the space of a grain of sand.

The Dutchman who thus first spied upon the world of infinitely small creatures was Anton van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), an untutored ex-shopkeeper and minor official of the picturesque city of Delft. (Some say that he was the janitor of the city hall.) He built his own microscopes — hundreds of them — and with them he observed anything that aroused his curiosity: the brain of a fly, the legs of a louse, sections of the crystalline lens of an ox's eye and the stinger of a bee.
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