MALI'liillL swammkhdam, leeuwenhoek 



575 



It is time to ask, with all his talents and prodigious application, what 

 ■did he leave to science? This is best answered by an examination of 

 the 'Biblia Naturae/ into which alt his work was collected. His treatise 

 on 'Bees and Mayflies' and a few other articles were published during 

 his lifetime, hut a large part of his observations remained entirely un- 

 known until ihey were published in this book fifty-seven years after 

 his death. In the folio edition it embraces 410 pages of text and fifty- 

 three plates, replete with figures of original observations. It "contains 

 about a dozen life-histories of insects worked out in more or less detail. 

 Of these, the Mayfly is the uiost famous; that on the lioneybee the mosl 



Fig. •">. From Swammeedam's 'Bibj.ia Naturje.' 



elaborate.'*' The greater amount of his work was in structural ento- 

 mology. It is known that he had a collection of about 3,000 different 

 species of insects, which for that period was a very large one. There 

 is, however, a considerable amount of work on other animals: the fine 

 anatomy of the snail, structure of the clam, the squid; observations on 

 the structure and development of the frog: observations on the con- 

 traction of muscles, etc., etc. 



It is to be 7-emembered that Swammerdam was extremely exact in 

 all that he did. His descriptions are models of accuracy and com- 

 pleteness. 



