10 LEEUWENHOEK AND HIS ‘‘ LITTLE ANIMALS ’”’ 
which I now offer for your indulgent perusal have been written 
at odd moments in the course of other studies of my own. 
Weeks, months, and even years, have often elapsed between sen- 
tences and paragraphs which now run consecutively in the 
following pages—long periods filled with most concentrated 
work on subjects but distantly related. I beg you, therefore, to 
bear this ever an mind, but especially when you detect inconsts- 
tencies (whereof there are, I fear, many) in the several sections 
of this book. it has been some 20 years a-writing, and I am 
not now the same person that I was 20 years ago. 
If you are disposed (which is like enough) to find fault with 
my poor scholarship, Iintreat you to consider kindly what I 
have already published of my own researches (which ws but a 
small fraction of what I have done), and to remember that the 
present publication of Leeuwenhoek’s work has been an addi- 
tional charge upon these my own most exacting labours. The 
whole of this book has been written at irregular intervals and 
under very great difficulties—mostly at the dead of night 
(between midnight and 8 a.m.) after a hard day’s work at my 
own researches, and with another similar day in the laboratory 
before me. IPf you find that I have done my task badly, please 
remember that it has been almost impossible for me to do vt at 
all. Icannot even tell you now how I have achieved it: but 
to show you the shifts to which I have been put wm order to 
carry out this undertaking, however wll, I may tell you that one 
of the following translations (and that, I think, not the worst) 
was made during several long and interrupted nights im the 
Great War, when German airplanes were trying to drop their 
bombs on London. Any one of these random missiles might 
well have fallen upon Burlington House and utterly destroyed 
all Weeuwenhoek’s priceless original letters (not to mention 
myself). . . . But he said himself prophetically that he 
“never trusted people, especially Germans”; though he also 
said more generously elsewhere, in another connexion, “ yet 
theyre to be forgiven, for they know no better”’. 
I know that I cannot paint you a true picture of Leeuwen- 
hoek’s protozoology and bacteriology without framing it with 
some authentic account of himself. This also I have therefore 
attempted. But almost every veridical record of his life ts 
buried in obscurity: almost every biographer of this great dis- 
coverer seems to have taken delight in burying his own findings 
in almost inaccessible places, where others could discover them 
