278 LEEUWENHOEK AND HIS “LITTLE ANIMALS”’ 
Fig. 2, DEFG shows this duckweed with its little roots, 
as it floated in a glass tube filled with water, whereby the 
roots are displayed. 
Fig. 38, HIKLMNOPQR shows a little piece of the 
root of a duckweed, as it appeared to the draughtsman 
through the microscope; in which rootlets you could 
discern the vessels, with their divisions, running long- 
ways along the root; and these rootlets (so I imagine), 
when’ they are of no further use, and as it were withered, 
get overgrown with very many peculiar long particles, 
mostly forming little figures that you might call “flowers”, 
as shown here for a short distance in Fig. 3, between K 
aad: A 
The animalcules aforesaid, that I have likened unto 
little bells, are shown in Fig. 3, between IST * and NVW,' 
whereof I have seen, upon some roots, even more than a 
hundred living, attached by their little tails, within a 
space such as HIKLM, Fig. 3; though upon other roots 
I discovered none. 
And I also saw fixed upon several roots one or even 
(though very seldom) two little cases,’ of various sizes, 
whereof the biggest is shown in Fig. 3, RXY. Out of 
this little case a little animal, with a small part of its 
body which looked roundish, made its appearance, as in 
Fig. 3, XZY: and thereupon there suddenly came out of 
SSS EEE 
‘“‘\vhen”’ is here omitted by Chamberlayne, who thus gives a slightly 
different turn to this passage. 
2 Diatoms and monads. 
* Carchesium polypinum—with branched (contractile) stem. Previously 
mentioned by L. in Letter 96. See p. 211 supra. 
‘ A group of 3 solitary individuals of Vortzcella sp. 
° Kokertjens MS. From the description and figures it is clear that the 
biggest organism here spoken of is not a protozoon but a tubicolous rotifer— 
almost certainly Limnias ceratophylli. It is certainly not Melicerta (from 
which L. clearly distinguished it), nor can it be Cothurnia (as Ehrenberg 
and others have stated). This ciliate is described a little later. The “little 
wheels ” were, of course, the cilia on the two lobes of the trochal disc—so 
interpreted by all early observers of Limnzas. 
