92 LEEUWENHOEK AND HIS “ LITTLE ANIMALS” 
realized—at death’s door. Yet even Death’s proximity could 
not abate his scientific zeal. Boitet the publisher—who 
cannot always be trusted, but who here probably wrote from 
recent personal knowledge—has left it on record that he 
continued his researches to the very end. He says:? 
Our Leeuwenhoek, who had a sound mind in a sound 
body, felt however about a year before his death that his 
bodily powers were getting noticeably weaker, owing to 
an asthmatical chest and other symptoms: nevertheless, 
he continued his course cheerfully to the end of his life 
along the track of Science, to win a deathless name at 
last, though forsooth he had won the race long before 
during his lifetime. Six-and-thirty hours before his death, 
when his limbs were already growing numb, the fire of 
his ardour glowed still so bright, that, with lips stammer- 
ing and well-nigh stiff, he directed his thoughts to be set 
down on paper regarding a kind of sand which a certain 
distinguished gentleman, a director of the East-India 
Company, had handed over to him, to find out whether 
any gold were concealed therein. 
And this account is supported from another quarter. As 
he lay dying, Leeuwenhoek summoned his friend Dr Jan 
Hoogvliet * to his bedside, and requested him to translate a 
couple of letters* into Latin and send them to the Royal Society 
as a parting gift. The good doctor did so, and dispatched 
* Boitet (1729), p. 768—translated. Z 
* Little seems to be now known about Johannes Hoogvliet, who is not 
mentioned by Banga or Hirsch or in the N. Nederl. Biogr. Woordenb. or any 
other available works cf reference. I have been able to ascertain only that 
he was a surgeon practising at Delft, and that he once published a work on 
wounds (Konst om wonden te schouwen, etc. 8°. Rotterdam, 1749). He was 
probably a kinsman (? brother) of the poet Arnold Hoogvliet (1687-1763) of 
Vlaardingen, who wrote the panegyric poem prefixed to the Send-brieven, 
and whose father—a shipowner and sheriff—was also called Johannes. 
* On “corpuscles in the blood and in the dregs of wine” and “the 
generation of animals and palpitation of the diaphragm.’”’ Published 
posthumously in Phil. Trans. (1724), Vol. XXXII, No. 380, pp. 436-440: 
not in Dutch or Latin collective works. 
