Highlights in the History of Microbiology 13 



periments and his boasts of the "beasties" he saw under his lenses, 

 one man, Regnier de Graaf (1641-1673), became truly curious and 

 eventually was accorded the rare privilege of peeping through some 

 of these lenses. To say that the observer was agog would phrase 

 the reaction in mild terms. Having been appointed a correspond- 

 ing member of the Royal Society for his interesting observations 

 on the subject of the human ovary, de Graaf implored the Society 

 to request a written account from Leeuwenhoek of his unbelievable 

 discoveries. As suspicious and jealous as Antony was, he finally 

 consented to the Society's invitation, and in his humble, unpolished 

 way he wrote a letter entitled "A Specimen of Some Observations 

 Made by the Microscope Contrived by Mr. Leeuwenhoek Con- 

 cerning Mould upon the Skin, Flesh, etc.; the Sting of a Bee, 

 etc." Quite a title. It is perfectly true that Leeuwenhoek had not 

 mastered the fine art of writing, but what a contribution this man 

 made to biological science! When the Royal Society, in its re- 

 served manner, asked that this original letter be followed by others, 

 they did not have long to wait. Records show that during the next 

 fifty years hundreds of such communications reached the Society 

 from Leeuwenhoek's laj3oratory in Holland. While he tended to 

 ramble in his writings and loved to discuss topics not always 

 pertinent to the subject at hand, each letter he wrote did contain 

 some gem, or gems, of a scientific nature. Bacteria were first 

 described by him in a letter written on October 9, 1676, to Henry 

 Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society. And in a letter written 

 in 1783 he sketched the three principal shapes of bacteria we 

 accept today: the rods (tube-like), the spheres (circles), and the 

 spirals (snake-like). 



Insatiable curiosity led this man to examine a wide variety of 

 objects under his lenses, including stagnant water, rain water, 

 scrapings of his teeth and the teeth of perfect strangers when he 

 thought their brown stains might reveal something his own white 

 teeth might not harbor, bodies of a wide variety of insects, the 

 intestinal contents of frogs, horses, and humans, spermatozoa of 

 man and lower animals, human skin, whale fibers, hairs of sheep. 



