4 LEEUWENHOEK AND HIS “ LITTLE ANIMALS” 
When I finally succeeded in obtaining a copy of the Dutch 
edition of Leeuwenhoek’s works, 7¢ was only to find that I 
could make out hardly anything of what he had written: for 
af the instructors of my youth had taught me a Latin in- 
adequate to my needs, they had never even pretended to teach 
me one single word of the languages spoken in the Netherlands. 
So I made a foolhardy attempt to learn Dutch by myself— 
using Leeuwenhoek’s printed Dutch letters as a text, and 
checking my interpretations by the Latin editions of the same 
letters and the old Dutch Bible. When JI had made some little 
progress in this study, and had got a smattering of seventeenth- 
century Dutch and Latin, I made the worst (and the best) 
discovery of all: I discovered that Leeuwenhoek’s own original 
Dutch letters—written by his very own hand, and many of 
them even now unpublished—are still, for the most part, extant 
among the manuscripts belonging to the Royal Society in 
London. I therefore went, all excited, to consult them 
and found that nearly all those most important for my purpose 
were inscribed in a script which, for all I could make of tt, 
might just as well have been Hebrew or Arabic. I could not 
read a single word. 
This was a blow which staggered me completely: and as we 
were then in the midst of the Great War, and my time was 
more than fully occupied with other and more urgent duties, I 
momentarily gave up all hope of ever being able to read 
Leeuwenhoek in the original. 
But after the War, when my own work was temporarily at 
a standstill, I returned one day—‘ merely out of curiosity” (as 
he would say)—to the library of the Royal Society, and puzzled 
over those tantalizing manuscripts. After a bit, I found that 
I could make out a word here and there: in a few days I could 
even read, now and then, a whole sentence. So I became— 
almost unconsciously—an amateur palaeographer, and at last 
attempted to find and decipher and copy all the passages which 
specially interested me in Leeuwenhoek’s letters. T'o an un- 
prepared and wholly inexperienced person like myself it was a 
task nearly as great as that which faced the first readers of the 
Rosetta Stone, and it was accomplished by similar methods. 
You may laugh, dear Reader, but it is true. You, who are 
doubtless familiar with Dutch and Latin and English of all 
periods, and for whom the deciphering of ancient manuscripts 
holds no terrors, must please try to put yourself in my ignorant 
