Anthony van Leeuwenhoek, the first bacteriologist / [David Fraser Fraser-Harris].

  • David Fraser Fraser-Harris
Date:
[1921]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Anthony van Leeuwenhoek, the first bacteriologist / [David Fraser Fraser-Harris]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    4/16 page 150
    a school for the education of colonial civil servants, a school of design, a theater, and a lunatic asylum. The town which is built in the form of a square is rather gloomy, and its narrow streets, flanked by high houses, have stagnant little canals in the middle of them. Such was the place at which we alighted from the Rotterdam train in the grey light of a January afternoon. Our fellow passengers stared as we left the carriage; they could understand our going on to the Hague, but what was there to detain an Englishman at Delft at that time of year? Only interest in the history of biology could make one search out the ponderous Oude Kerk to view the tomb of a man whose very name is an unknown sound to all save a few. We knew, however, that in that ungainly old church towering over the crowded houses lay buried an indefatigable worker in Nature’s invisible world, one whose greatest honor in life was, as it is the boast in the inscription on his tomb, to have been enrolled a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, or “of England,” as it puts it. The F. R. S. told Leeuwenhoek in his lifetime that he had not lived in vain. We know from the good work he did that, whether he had been made an F. R. S. or not, he belonged to the innermost circle of the scientific immortals. This F. R. S. was, perhaps, the one great event in a life devoid of incident, at any rate empty of any¬ thing like the incidents that filled Malpighi’s. Malpighi, for whom a chair was created by a Grand Duke and he a Prince of the Medici, who was invited to teach in the University of Messina, and then entreated to leave it for the chief professorship of medicine at Italy’s premier University of Bologna, who was con¬ strained to end his days in the elegant sinecure of physician to the visible head of Christendom, and who was an F. R. S. to boot—even his life has been described as devoid of incident! What, then, must be said of Leeuwenhoek’s? Leeuwenhoek probably never left Holland, it is doubtful if he ever quitted Delft. That Leeuwenhoek was a per¬ son of reliable character may be incidentally gathered from his hav¬ ing been made curator or trustee for the widow of Jan van der Meer the painter who was born at Delft in 1632 and died in 1675. Malpighi was a hereditary landowner, Leeuwenhoek began life as assistant or clerk to a linendraper. He worked all his days in the little town where he was born, and seemed content to know that not only his countrymen, but those generous men of science in the greatest city of the world had recognized his worth. Science had equal need of the landowner and the linendraper. According to some accounts Leeuwenhoek was a man of independent means which he had inherited from relatives who were brewers, but he seems for the greater part of his life to have held the post of beadle (bedellus) to some public body
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image
    No text description is available for this image