STUART AND PETIVER 79 
I have received your Letter of the 2nd of August anno 
1711, wherein you are displeased at not being welcomed 
at my house. I beg you please not to take it ill, seeing 
that we send off everyone who tries to visit me, unless 
they have some sort of introduction. 
I willingly received Mr Alexander Stuart Medicina? 
Doctor, who presented me with the dissertation for his 
degree, and had with him your T’ransactions, and a letter 
from Mr Hans Sloane, and brought with him also two 
other Gentlemen; and I let them see sundry observations 
of mine. Since that time I would gladly have received 
you on divers days; and if you had kept by you the letter 
from Mr Hans Sloane, you would not have missed a 
friendly entertainment at my house. And you were sent 
away especially because you were not known, and because 
some 8 or 10 days earlier no less than 26 people came to 
see me within four days, all of them with introductions 
(except a Duke and a Count, with their Tutor): which 
made me so tired, that I broke out in a sweat all over. 
This being so, I beg that you will not take it amiss 
in me, that, to my great sorrow, you were turned away. 
If my poor old legs could have stood it, I would have 
looked you up in Rotterdam. 
In 1716, when he was in his 84th year, the University of 
Louvain officially honoured Leeuwenhoek by sending him a 
medal in recognition of his work. ‘This incident—which 
corresponds roughly, at the present time, with the conferring 
of an honorary degree—is not uninteresting, and may there- 
fore be noted here with Leeuwenhoek’s own comments. 
in Dutch. The rest of this letter was published (in English) in Phil. Trans. 
(1711), Vol. XXVII, No. 331, p.316. It is not in the Dutch or Latin 
collective works. 
So in original: “ medicina ” (for medicinae) is not a lapsus calami but 
a mistake on L.’s part—for he knew no Latin, and makes similar mistakes 
elsewhere. 
* Stuart’s thesis for his medical degree at Leyden was entitled ‘‘ De 
structura et motu musculari’’—a subject which greatly interested L. It 
was published in 1711 (4°. Leyden), and afterwards reprinted more than 
once. 
