THE AUTHOR'S EPISTLE TO THE READER 3 
including those in the human mouth, and more especially the 
Spirochaetes. And here again I found—this time to my amaze- 
ment—that all these organisms also had first been seen and 
described by Leeuwenhoek. It seemed impossible ; so again I 
attempted to ascertain who this person really was, and what 
precisely he had discovered in this connexion. But I failed 
once more. 
Somewhat later, I turned my attention particularly to the 
intestinal protozoa of man—only to find that thevr first observer 
was, incredible though it seemed, again Leeuwenhoek. : 
To make a long story short, I continually found that whatever 
protozoa or bacteria I worked at, I was always forestalled and 
led back to the same mysterious and eluswe indiwidual who had 
somehow succeeded in registering the first observations on almost 
every kind of microbe I attempted to investigate. 
It is now some 25 years since I first began to try and find 
out something about Leeuwenhoek and his discoveries in proto- 
zoology and bacteriology. The task has always been hard, but 
because of my personal interest it has never been irksome. My 
interest has, indeed, grown with my knowledge; and the more 
I have found out, the more I have ever wanted to find out about 
this truly marvellous man and his works. From the very 
beginning, I have been able to get little or no help from the 
writings of others (most of whom merely led me astray), so that 
I have always had to do the best I could for myself. Conse- 
quently, the first few years of my labours were woefully barren : 
they yielded me little else than imperfect copies of Leeuwenhoek's 
publications in Latin, and their garbled English version—the 
“Select Works” of Hoole. As I soon detected the shortcomings 
(also the merits) of the latter, I applied myself at first to the 
study of the “ original” Latin texts. 
Thad barely begun to read the Latin letters of Leeuwenhoek, 
however, when I met with a serious setback. I found that 
these letters were not written in the Latin which I learnt at 
school, but in a language I could scarcely wunderstand—a 
language bristling with difficulties for a man like myself, whose 
‘“ Latin” was little more than a fading recollection of the 
dialect used by writers of the Augustan age. Yet long before 
I had mastered Leeuwenhoekian Latin I received a far worse 
shock: I discovered that Leeuwenhoek himself knew no Latin 
at all (of any kind or sort), and that all his own writings were 
really in Dutch. Profoundly discowraged, I therefore began a 
new search for the Dutch originals. 
