126 Transactions of the Society. 



appreciation of the most distinguished men of his time, were a 

 great encouragement to him durin^r the most active period of his 

 career, and a source of lively satisfaction to him during his old age. 

 He appears to have been sceptical of the medicine of his time, and 

 there is a sly humour in his remarks at the end of his work on 

 digestion, where he says : " Some will think that I am going out 

 of my province, but these considerations weigh very little with me, 

 forasmuch as every judicious person knows that physicians them- 

 selves in many things proceed merely by guess, and therefore I 

 assume to myself the liberty of offering my suggestions on the 

 subject." This is a sly hit, no doubt, at someone's Theories, this 

 word usually being only a euphemism for guesses. But he 

 was learned in Physic, in Natural Knowledge, and he was a 

 remarkable anatomist, as can be seen from his description of 

 structures. Curiously, for the time, he did not study alchemy, 

 that insatiable demand on the Unknown : this is the more remark- 

 al)le as the only two contemporary scientists who can be said to 

 be greater than Leeuwenhoek, could not leave it alone. I refer to 

 Leibnitz, and, more strangely, to Newton. 



" To know " is the first condition of the commerce of mankind 

 with the things that are ; it is the starting point of the study of 

 the universe. Science, wliich is the summation of " to know," alone 

 can supply the foundation of reality necessary to life. If, like 

 Leibnitz — a friend of Leeuwenhoek's — we conceive the individual 

 to be a mirror in which the universe is reflected, it is by Science 

 that the individual will be able to reflect a larger or smaller 

 portion of what actually is. There is something unlawful in the 

 bold act of a man who endeavours to penetrate the mystery of 

 things, and this seems to be part of the charm of research — 

 apparently dating from that day in the Garden of Eden when Eve 

 tried the apple and persuaded poor Adam to do the like. So 

 Science was the first sin ; and the ancients looked upon all 

 acquisition of knowledge as a robbery, as an act of defiance : 

 witness the fable of Prometheus, and the representation of the 

 conquests of civilization as an illicit rape upon a jealous divinity, 

 who wished to keep them to himself ; yet our hero, and a still 

 greater contemporary — one of the very greatest thinkers the world 

 has ever produced, the excommunicated Jew Benedict de Spinoza — 

 were the gentlest, purest, least selfish and least self-advertising 

 men known to Science or to any other branch of endeavour. But, 

 nevertheless, he was insatiate : and we can fancy how, with his 

 rage for enquiry, he would press everyone into his service, from 

 Captain Isaac van Krimpen, who brought him the eye of a whale, 

 to the glassblower who came to the fair at Delft ; from the men who 

 unloaded the ships from the Indies there, down to the little maid- 

 servant who caught his fleas for him, taking care not to damage 

 them, and put them into a glass tube he had given her. 



