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I was ignorant at the time of the thousands of acute intellects engaged in the same pursuit as myself, and with the advantages of instruments a thousand times more powerful than mine. The names of Leeuwenhoek, Williamson, Spencer, Ehrenberg, Schultz, Dujardin, Schact, and Schleiden were then entirely unknown to me, or if known, I was ignorant of their patient and wonderful researches.
That discovery remained, so to speak, dormant for fully a century, and then the question was taken up by a French discoverer, who, paying great attention and having the advantage of better instruments than Leeuwenhoek had, watched these things and made the astounding discovery that they were bodies which were constantly being reproduced and growing; than when one of these rounded bodies was once formed and had grown to its full size, it immediately began to give off a little bud from one side, and then that bud grew out until it had attained the full size of the first, and that, in this way, the yeast particle was undergoing a process of multiplication by budding, just as effectual and just as complete as the process of multiplication of a plant by budding; and thus this Frenchman, Cagniard de la Tour, arrived at the conclusion very creditable to his sagacity, and which has been confirmed by every observation and reasoning since that this apparently muddy refuse was neither more nor less than a mass of plants, of minute living plants, growing and multiplying in the sugary fluid in which the yeast is formed.
Unrivalled dissectors, Swammerdam, Leeuwenhoek, Winslow, Eustachius, Heister, Vesalius, Boerhaave, had left nothing for scalpel or microscope to reveal in human or comparative anatomy; Linnaeus, his contemporary, was affirming, in his beautiful science, that "Nature is always like herself;" and, lastly, the nobility of method, the largest application of principles, had been exhibited by Leibnitz and Christian Wolff, in cosmology; whilst Locke and Grotius had drawn the moral argument.
It was toward the close of the seventeenth century that the Dutch microscopist, Leeuwenhoek, working with his simple lenses, first saw the organisms which we now know under this name, with sufficient clearness to describe them. Beyond mentioning their existence, however, his observations told little or nothing.
Back in the thirties, in the day of the early enthusiasm over the perfected microscope, there had arisen a new interest in the minute forms of life which Leeuwenhoek and some of the other early workers with the lens had first described, and which now were shown to be of almost universal prevalence.
They multiply with great rapidity, by giving off minute buds, which soon attain the size of their parent, and then either become detached or remain united, forming the compound globules of which Leeuwenhoek speaks, though the constancy of their arrangement in sixes existed only in the worthy Dutchman's imagination.
Throwing his massive head back against the purple velvet lining, he adjusted his steel-rimmed spectacles, joined his hands, and built a pyramid with his fingers; while he scrutinized her as coldly, as searchingly as Swammerdam or Leeuwenhoek might have inspected some new and as yet unclassified animalculum, or as Filippi or Pasteur studied the causes of "Pébrine." "What do you think of New York?"
The accurate investigation of the lowest forms of animal life, commenced by Leeuwenhoek and Swammerdam, and continued by the remarkable labours of Reaumur, Trembley, Bonnet, and a host of other observers, in the latter part of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth centuries, drew the attention of biologists to the gradation in the complexity of organisation which is presented by living beings, and culminated in the doctrine of the "echelle des etres," so powerfully and clearly stated by Bonnet; and, before him, adumbrated by Locke and by Leibnitz.
Its weight, as I learned from Simon, was exactly one hundred and forty carats. Here was an amazing coincidence. The hand of Destiny seemed in it. On the very evening when the spirit of Leeuwenhoek communicates to me the great secret of the microscope, the priceless means which he directs me to employ start up within my easy reach!
Leeuwenhoek saw that this muddy stuff was in reality a liquid, in which there were floating this immense number of definitely shaped particles, all aggregated in heaps and lumps and some of them separate.
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