The President's Address. By G. S. Woodkead. 113 



to have been Secretary of the Royal Society in 1677, when Hooke 

 was also in office.- 



A great Dutch contemporary of van Leeuwenhoek, Jan Swam- 

 merdani (1637-1680), was the first, apparently, to give a descrip- 

 tion of red blood corpuscles (1658) ; whilst he laid all histologists 

 under a great debt by introducing warm wax injections, by 

 means of which a much more intimate knowledge of the relations 

 of the blood-vessels to one another and to the surrounding tissues 

 was obtained. 



Leeuwenhoek, who is described as an inheritor of well-to-do 

 brewers, is said to have " led an easy-going life " ; it is allowed, 

 however, that during that " easy-going life " he contributed no 

 fewer than 375 scientific papers to the Royal Society of London, 

 and 27 to the French Academy, which "contain, in addition to a 

 vast amount of work on animalcule? and plant histology, many dis- 

 coveries of capital importance to medicine," amongst these the 

 histological characters of voluntary muscle, from which has arisen 

 all our present knowledge of the mechanism of muscular con- 

 traction. They also contain an account of the structure of the 

 crystalline lens, which has provided the modern physiologist and 

 pathologist with a basis on which to build up the pathology of 

 cataract. 



I would refer those who wish to know something about the 

 Microscope with which Leeuwenhoek did his work to Mr. Nelson's 

 paper,* and it is interesting to note that he made out the transverse 

 diameter of the red corpuscles in human blood to be T340 tn °^ 

 an inch, a measurement that differs very considerably from that 

 obtained by use of our present lenses, 33^0^ °f an mcn - 



Histology has ever been a bone for which the anatomist on 

 the one hand, and the physiologist on the other, have contended 

 Were we to consider merely the earlier microscopic researches on 

 the structure of the tissues, we should undoubtedly have to cede 

 this branch of research to the anatomist, as it is to Marcello 

 Malpighi (1628-1694), to whom reference has already been made, 

 that we owe much of the most fruitful and accurate of the early 

 work on this subject. After professing anatomy in three Italian 

 Universities, Malpighi died whilst acting as physician to Pope 

 Innocent XII. Human anatomy was but a small part of the field 

 tilled and cultivated by this indefatigable genius. As pointed 

 out by Dr. Plimmer, the final demonstration of Harvey's almost- 

 demonstrated theory of the circulation of the blood was given by 

 Malpighi, who, with his Microscope, traced it in its course through 

 the capillaries of the lungs from one chamber of the heart to the 

 other, demonstrating not only the presence of these capillaries, but 

 their structure. Insects, animals, plants, histology, embryology, 



* See this Journal, 1910, p. 42, "What did our forefathers see in a Micro- 

 scope ?" 



