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According to Leeuwenhoek, Muller, Gleichen, and others, the campaigns of Zenzis-Khan, Alexander, Attila, were not half so murderous as a single fashionable dinner; and the battle of Marengo was a farce in comparison with the swallowing of a cup of tea, which contains " "For shame, you tormentor! when you know that I love tea as well as did your model of politeness, Dr. Johnson!
Nor does the degree of transparency of the retina invalidate the evidence of its fibrous structure, since Leeuwenhoek has shewn that the crystalline humour itself consists of fibres.
The first step towards the solution of this problem was made two centuries ago by the patient and painstaking Dutch naturalist, Leeuwenhoek, who in the year 1680 wrote thus:
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.
The structure of bone, now so beautifully made out, even that of the teeth, in which old Leeuwenhoek, peeping with his octogenarian eyes through the minute lenses wrought with his own hands, had long ago seen the "pipes," as he called them, was hardly known at all. The minute structure of the viscera lay in the mists of an uncertain microscopic vision.
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.
Ed. Thus Leeuwenhoek discovered that yeast consists of globules floating in a fluid; but he thought that they were merely the starchy particles of the grain from which the wort was made, re-arranged. He discovered the fact that yeast had a definite structure, but not the meaning of the fact.
Here also is the tomb of Peter Heyn, who from a simple fisherman rose to be a great admiral, and took that memorable netful of Spanish ships that had under their hatches more than eleven million florins; also the tomb of Leeuwenhoek, the father of the science of the infinitely small who, with the "divining-glass," as Parini says, "saw primitive man swimming in the genital wave."
Now, Leeuwenhoek went to work upon this yeast mud, and by applying to it high powers of the microscope, he discovered that it was no mere mud such as you might at first suppose, but that it was a substance made up of an enormous multitude of minute grains, each of which had just as definite a form as if it were a grain of corn, although it was vastly smaller, the largest of these not being more than the two-thousandth of an inch in diameter; while, as you know, a grain of corn is a large thing, and the very smallest of these particles were not more than the seven-thousandth of an inch in diameter.
The first thing was to make out precisely and clearly what was the nature of this substance, this apparently mere scum and mud that we call yeast. And that was first commenced seriously by a wonderful old Dutchman of the name of Leeuwenhoek, who lived some two hundred years ago, and who was the first person to invent thoroughly trustworthy microscopes of high powers.
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