fae VAUTHOR'S © EPISTLE TO... THE . “READER: 
Introducing Mynher ANTONY van LEEUWENHOEK 
of Delft in Holland, Fellow of the Royal Society of London 
in England. 
Dear READER: I know full well that you and everyone else 
must have met Mr van Leeuwenhoek many a time before ; but 
please let me reintroduce him to you, for he is a man worth 
knowing more intimately. Though he was born exactly 300 
years ago he ws still very much alive, and would be glad to make 
your better acquaintance—provided only that you are “a true 
lover of learning” (as of course you are). But as his fleshly 
body ceased to work and dissolved in dust about a century 
before your grandfather came into the world, and as he himself 
knows no language but very old-fashioned Dutch, I think 
you will agree that an introducer and interpreter may not be 
superfluous and might even be helpful? So please let me tell 
you how I first met Mr Leeuwenhoek, and why I now presume 
to take these onerous offices wpon myself without any obvious 
call or qualification. Let me tell you why I, an almost un- 
known living Englishman, wish to make you more nearly 
familiar with a famous old Hollander who wrought and died 
long before we were born. 
When I was a very young man I began to study, for my 
own amusement, the microscopic creatures in organic infusions ; 
and in the cowrse of some desultory reading I then, to my 
surprise, discovered—a thing I ought, naturally, to have known— 
that these “ little animals” had originally been observed more 
than two centuries earlier by somebody called, more or less, 
Leeuwenhoek. (J say“ more or less” because I found his name 
spelled in a great variety of ways: and being then only some 
20 years of age, and having no knowledge of Dutch, I could not 
tell which way was right.) On looking into the matter, I found 
of course that this man with the strange patronymic was really 
a well-known figure in the History of Biology—notwithstanding 
I! 
