REPLY TO JAMES JURIN 89 
respect that they have for my work, which I accomplish 
alone by my own impulse and inclination. For no money 
could ever have driven me to make discoveries, and I’m 
only working out as ’twere an impulse that was born in 
me, and I imagine I never meet with any other people 
who would spend so much time and work in searching 
into the things of Nature. And withal I had great pleasure 
too at hearing that the learned and curious Mr James 
Jurin’s investigations have made him eye-witness of my 
discoveries." 
The same Gentleman also said, that your Fellows very 
earnestly desired, if ’twere possible, that my observations 
should be confirmed and cleared up by repeating them, so 
that the mouth of the unbelieving might be stifled. 
On this matter I would reply to your Honourable 
Fellows, that I have indeed inquired into many things of 
one and the same nature, but not thought it needful to 
describe them all, because the one must imply the others. 
And those things that are not easy to believe, I have left 
standing for days, nay years, before the magnifying-glass, 
to let them be seen by as many people as possible; like 
the vessels in the nerves, which have lain so long before 
the magnifying-glass, that they have been all eaten up by 
that little creature the Mite.” 
By this time Leeuwenhoek was an old and sick and dying 
man. But despite his age and his infirmities he still continued 
to make observations and send letters to the Royal Society. 
In two letters, written in March and May 1723, he even gave 
the Society an account of the illness from which he suffered 
in the last year of his life. Both letters were translated into 
Latin, and they were the last he lived to sign: their Dutch 
originals are now lost. As the relevant passages are of great 
personal interest, I shall quote them at length. On19 March 
“The whole of this paragraph is ungrammatical and very loosely 
constructed in the original. 
* The two foregoing paragraphs were paraphrased—not translated—in the 
Phil. Trans., though their sense is there conveyed correctly. 
