Volume 5

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.

    39/518 (page 21)
    now declare that these minute particles of salt cannot pass from our stomachs or intestines into our blood and other parts of our bodies, unless these minute particles of salt are further divisible into an inconceivable number of infinitesimal particles. I imagine, indeed, that were I to perceive a particle of salt no bigger than 1 -of a coarse qrain of sand and this aqain were divided 1000000000 y a into a thousand million particles, each particle would nonetheless be an exact square or quadratic of salt. Strange as this may seem to many, they would do well to remember the minute organisms actually living in ordinary water and our excrements, no larger than ——-— of a coarse qrain of sand, that they have a skin and — 1000000000 y 7 who knows ? — the skin may carry scales and that the organism must have feet or fins to enable it to swim; moreover, it must have a mouth, intestines, arteries, muscles, nerves, in fact all the organs which a large animal possesses”’). If we now imagine the whole body of this tiny creature split up into its several sections, we shall no longer be so amazed at the minuteness of the particles of salt to which I have referred. And it is these particles, after they have again agglomerated in our blood (which has been outside the veins for some time) that I claim to have seen in our blood30). To be sure, when I was recently engaged in observing the crystalline water31) derived from a human eye, I noticed a multitude of salt particles in it of the same shape as that of our common salt32) 29) See inter alia the letters of 9 October 1676 (note 10) and 27 Septem¬ ber 1678 (ibid. II, pp. 69 and 391). 30) See note 8 to letter of 26 March 1675 (ibid. I, p. 283). 31) Crystalline water = vitreous body (corpus vitreum). [H.] 32) L. may possibly have examined the eyeball of a person suffering from “synchysis scintillans” or “synchysis nivea”. Synchysis is a word used in the oldest Greek literature, but to describe something very different from what we mean by it. The term in its modern sense of “changes in the vitreous body” was first used by the French oculist Parfait-Landrau in an article published by him in 1828 in the Revue Médicinale IV, p. 203. In it Parfait- Landrau describes small glittering corpuscles which he detected in the posterior chamber of the eye of a 70-year-old patient. At a later date Desmarres described a similar phenomenon in the Annales d’Oculistique 14 (1845), p. 220 under the title of “Synchisis étincelant”. [Z.] The first rudiments of a crystal. Salts in the crystal body of a human eye. Synchisis.