LIFE AND THE CELL 49 



world through a lens. Not only were his lenses more sensational than any- 

 thing that had yet been produced, but the eye at the objective was 

 shrewder, brighter, more restless. There was only oile trouble, and that 

 was that the mind behind the lens was not the equal of the crystal or the 

 cornea. 



The inveterate Peeping Tom of Delft called his opus Secrets of Nature, 

 and some of the secrets he revealed were the human male's spermatozoa, 

 the bacteria he found in his mouth by scraping his back teeth, the genera- 

 tion of fleas, the eggs of tadpoles, and the true nature of the red corpuscles 

 of the blood. His minor discoveries are almost endless, though he never 

 had the patience to tunnel through until fact met fact in a significant pene- 

 tration. There was even a moment when he made an absurd pretension — 

 he declared that he saw in the spermatozoon a whole tiny man, body and 

 limbs and head. 



He drove nails in the coffin of the spontaneous generation theory by his 

 discovery that vermin are not bred out of filth but come from eggs laid 

 there by their predecessors. He revolutionized our view of sex, diminish- 

 ing the importance of the male, when he showed that plant aphids re- 

 produce parthenogenetically, by a sort of virgin birth of endless fatherless 

 generations. He found the true egg of ants, and revealed that what are 

 called and still sold as ant eggs are in reality ant pupae in their chrysalids. 

 One day he discovered the striated nature of muscles, and another he dug 

 out of his rain gutter those fascinating dervish animalculae, the rotifers. 

 He started enough lines of inquiry to found a whole school of biology — 

 and yet he was so jealous of his knowledge that he never took a pupil. 



It was in this era, too, that man first worked on the fascinating problem 

 of the irritability and motions of plants, stimulated to it by the arrival 

 from the tropics of a mere botanical curiosity, the sensitive plant. It was 

 an era when men began to suspect and assert — though they risked the rack 

 for it — the animate nature of fossils. 



So it may seem to us that the colorful seventeenth century was almost 

 within sight of our own, as it pursued the nature of the cell and attacked 

 the paralyzing myth of spontaneous generation, penetrated close to the 

 heart of sex and unwrapped the mystery that clings around the seed. We 

 have the feeling that the men of that age were coasting along golden shores 

 that were hidden from them in thin mists, and that with a little more per- 

 severance, vision and daring, they would have had a landfall of twentieth- 

 century discovery. 



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