Volume 11

Alle de brieven van Antoni van Leeuwenhoek / uitgegeven, geïllustreerd en van aanteekeningen voorzien door een Commissie van Nederlandsche geleerden.

  • Antonie van Leeuwenhoek
Date:
1939-
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Alle de brieven van Antoni van Leeuwenhoek / uitgegeven, geïllustreerd en van aanteekeningen voorzien door een Commissie van Nederlandsche geleerden. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    23/406 (page 7)
    also to be impossible that a large caterpillar can bear small worms, from which small worms come small flies; and all the experience known to me amounts to this that the caterpillars neither lay eggs nor produce caterpillars, but it is only when the caterpillars have been metamorphosed into flying or running creatures that they are able to reproduce2). Meanwhile I remain. Highly Learned Sir, Your Obedient Servant Antony van Leeuwenhoek. 2) The problem of the parasitization on caterpillars was first mentioned by Goedaert, who ob¬ served that a caterpillar of the large garden white (Pieris brassicae L.) sometimes produced a large garden white and sometimes as many as 40 to 50 small worms (J. Goedaert [1660], Metamorphosis naturalis, vol. 1, p. 42). Leeuwenhoek, too, struggled with this problem; he reached a solution for the parasitization on the aphid when he saw an ichneumon fly lay its eggs in an aphid (Letter [134] of 26 October 1700, Sevende Vervolg Der Brieven, pp. 285-286).