Nelson • Vegetable Jewels at Work 



14B 



Eugene W. Nelson 



Vegetable Jewels at Work 



Reprinted with the permission of the publisher 

 from Nature Magazine 40(3) : 121-124, 1947. 



About two hundred and fifty years 

 ago a queer fellow dwelt in the cit}' of 

 Delft, Holland. His name was Antony 

 van Leeuwenhoek. He had absolutely 

 no scientific training. In fact, he seems 

 to have been some sort of small busi- 

 ness man, although he had a consider- 

 able fortune to fall back on in hard 

 times. Another asset he had was an 

 intense interest in the then little- 

 known instrument, the microscope. He 

 even taught himself how to make fine 

 lenses, and how to assemble his lenses 

 into primitive microscopes. He made 

 nearly two hundred and fifty such in- 

 struments during his long life, and, 

 simple as they were, they were better 

 than any others of that period. 



Once, van Leeuwenhoek looked at 

 a drop of what he thought was "clear" 

 water. He was astounded to find a 

 number of "wretched beasties"— as he 

 called them— swimming about in the 

 liquid. One of these animals, as w^e can 

 tell by his further written description 

 of it, was actually a tiny and exquisitely 

 formed plant. Later-day scientists were 

 to call this a "diatom," and discover its 

 vital place in Nature. 



Since that time, many facts con- 

 cerning the nature, life, and uses of 



the diatom have been established. 

 Great progress has also been made by 

 industrial research workers in putting 

 the dead remains of these microscopic 

 bits of life to work for us. Although the 

 diatom plays a remarkably interesting 

 and important role during its short life- 

 time, this delicate plant has a record 

 as a hard worker that is scarcely sur- 

 passed by any other form of vegetable 

 or animal life in the entire world. 



A diatom is a single-celled plant. It 

 is familiar to even'one who has ever 

 been exposed to high school botany. 

 To make out all the minute details of 

 a diatom's structure requires a micro- 

 scope of fairly high resolving power. 

 In fact, diatoms are so tiny that the 

 number of them necessarv to fill the 

 space of only one cubic inch is counted 

 in the billions. 



These tiny plants produce a liquid 

 composed of pure silica. Tlie liquid 

 hardens and forms a protective coating 

 all around each of the individual 

 plants. The covering takes the form of 

 a crystalline, glasslike box— for glass 

 itself is composed mainly of sand, and 

 sand, in turn, is silica. The diatom's 

 box is in two separate parts. One part 

 laps snugly over the other half like 



