CAPILLARIES AND CORPUSCLES 73 



a German Jesuit named Kircher, in giving a very con- 

 fused account of the plague, had described microscopic 

 bodies in the blood of plague patients. He rushed to the 

 conclusion that they were the cause of plague, but they 

 were, in fact, rouleaux of blood corpuscles. 



A better account was given by a Dutchman, Jacob van 

 Swammerdam, at a date somewhat later than Malpighi's 

 discovery. This Swammerdam was a most -remarkable 

 character, who in some respects resembled Servetus. Had 

 he lived a century or so earlier he might have suffered 

 the same fate. As it was, he passed his short life in com- 

 parative peace, though tortured by the misgivings of a 

 diseased mind. His unstable and fanatical temper pre- 

 vented him from publishing much work in his lifetime. 

 He died in 1680, and fifty years afterwards the manu- 

 script of his great Bible of Nature was rescued and pub- 

 lished. It is one of the most beautifully illustrated works 

 on natural history that has ever been produced, and is a 

 storehouse of valuable information, to which naturalists 

 often turn even nowadays. 



In that work Swammerdam wrote : ' I saw a serum in 

 the blood [of a frog] in which were a vast number of 

 roundish particles, of a flat, oval, but regular form. . . . 

 When I viewed them sideways they resembled crystalline 

 clubs, or other figures, according as they were turned 

 about in various directions in the serum of the blood. I 

 observed besides that the colour of the objects always 

 appeared the more faint the more they were magnified 

 with a microscope." These were the red corpuscles. 

 It should be added that Swammerdam says elsewhere 

 that he thought he saw globules in the human blood, 

 though he was inclined to think that they were formed 

 after it had been removed from the body, and were 

 not found in the blood while still confined in the 

 vessels. 



