96 LEEUWENHOEK AND HIS “ LITTLE ANIMALS”’ 
public benefit you may live to equal, or even excel, those 
grand old men of Troy.’ 
The cabinet of microscopes bequeathed to the Royal 
Society—yreferred to in the foregoing letter—-had been briefly 
described by Leeuwenhoek himself twenty-two years earlier. 
In an unpublished passage in an otherwise published letter to 
the Society he had written *: 
I have a very little Cabinet, lacquered black and gilded, 
that comprehendeth within it five little drawers, wherein 
lie inclosed 13 long and square little tin cases, which I 
have covered over with black leather; and in each of 
these little cases lie two ground magnifying-glasses 
(making 26 in all), every one of them ground by myself, 
and mounted in silver, and furthermore set in silver, 
almost all of them in silver that I extracted from the ore, 
and separated from the gold wherewith it was charged ; 
and therewithal is writ down what olject standeth before 
each little glass. 
This little Cabinet with the said magnifying-glasses, as 
I may yet have some use for it, | have committed to my 
only daughter, bidding her send it to You after my death, 
in acknowledgement of my gratitude for the honour I 
have enjoyed and received from Your Excellencies. 
On 4 October 1723, Leeuwenhoek’s bequest was duly and 
dutifully dispatched to the Royal Society by his daughter 
1 ut... Iliacos aequare senes aut vincere possis MS. This is apparently 
borrowed from the hexameter of Statius: “‘Iliacos aequare senes, et vincere 
persta”’ (Silvae, lib. II, iii, 73). I take it that by these words Gribius 
meant to say that he hoped Dr Jurin would live long enough to rival, by his 
scientific performances, the doughty deeds of the heroes of ancient Greece 
in the field of battle: but the comparison seems somewhat forced, to say 
the least. 
2 Brom Letter 140. 2 August 1701. MS.Roy.Soc. Printed (Dutch) 
in Sevende Vervolg der Brieven (1702), p. 375; and (Latin) in Opera Omnia 
(Contin. Arc. Nat.), Vol. III, p. 355. I translate from the Dutch MS. 
(Words here italicized were underlined by L. himself in the original.) 
Although this Letter was not published in the Phil. Trans., the passage 
here given was translated into English and entered in the Society’s Letter- 
books (Vol. XIII, p. 183), and this entry was long afterwards extracted and 
printed by Weld (Vol. I, pp. 244-8). 
