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.

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    In the printed account of the monuments in the church we were informed that van Leeuwenhoek’s friend the Dutch poet, H. C. Poot, who, in some respects, is to be compared with the famous Scottish bard, Robert Bums, honored his memory with the following epitaph which is carved in the freestone block at the entrance to the grave: “Here lies Anthony van Leeuwenhoek, oldest member of the Royal Society of London; born in the town of Delft on 24th October, 1632, and died on the 26th of August, 1723, at the age of 90 years, 10 months, and 2 days. If, 0 wanderer, respect for great age and wonderful gifts is universal, then guide thy steps with reverence here, for here hoary science in Leeuwenhoek lies buried.” Once more one could not help comparing the tombs of the two great contemporary microscopists of the seventeenth century. How different their last resting places; here an air of chillness, cheerless¬ ness and massiveness pervades the place, so different from the warmth, the color, the brightness and the tinsel of the southern church of St. Gregory. Of course we returned to pay our respects to the great van Tromp, for we would not on any account have hurt the feelings of our grave and courteous cicerone who sold us a printed account of the tombs in his church and a faded, amateur photograph of Leeuwenhoek’s monu¬ ment. There being nothing else to detain us, we stepped out into the dark of the winter evening. Here, then, within a few hundred yards of one another lie three of Holland’s great men—van Tromp, Hugo Grotius and van Leeuwenhoek; a hero of Holland’s naval wars, a hero in Holland’s religious struggles, and a hero in the peaceful, silent conquests of science in the world of the “infinitely little.” But whose work re¬ mains? What have we of van Tromp’s today? We have his memory in naval history, and how it was his guns that made London quake and that turned old Albermarle down to the mouth of the Thames to reply to them; we have this gorgeous mausoleum in Delft, and we have the popular song beginning— Van Tromp was an admiral brave and bold, And he walked beside the sea. but it would be difficult to name much else. And what remains of Grotius, in his lifetime the world-read Arminian theologian ? Under the dust of our libraries rest his treatises on Divinity, International Law, Political Liberty and Dutch History. And of Leeuwenhoek?—the whole science of bacteriology, Leeuwenhoek was the first human being to see a protozoan, a bacterium and a micrococcus, and those he first described were scraped from his own teeth. It was to the Royal Society of London that these discoveries fraught with such consequences to the science of medicine were an-
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