280 LEEUWENHOEK AND HIS ‘‘ LITTLE ANIMALS” 
with the animalcule as it looked when it stuck part of its 
body (gh) out of it, at which time alone you could now 
and then just make out the two little wheels,’ because of 
their exceeding smallness, but only when its body was 
straightened out, for otherwise it lay drawn up short. 
Further, I discovered a little animal * whose body was 
at times long, at times drawn up short, and to the middle 
of whose body (where I imagined the undermost part of 
its belly was) a still lesser animalcule of the same make 
seemed to be fixed fast by its hinder end. Such alittle 
animal, because of its wonderful structure and manner of 
propagation, I have had drawn, and at least twice as big 
as it looks to the naked eye when you see it in the water 
and attached to the root of a bit of duckweed. Tig. 4, 
ABCDEFG, shows this creature, whereof A is the hind 
end that it hangs on by, while at CDE are shown its 
eight * horns (though others a bit smaller had six horns), 
as it looked when it had straightened itself out, for other- 
wise it can scarce reach to a quarter of this length; and 
its horns seemed to my eye to be made in so marvellous 
a manner, that the draughtsman’s art isn’t competent to 
portray them, though the artist did his best to draw a 
small bit of a horn, as shown at KLM in Fig. 5. 
In Fig. 4, at BH, is shown a little animal that is coming 
out of the first one; and formerly, when I saw such a 
little animal fixed to a bigger one, I imagined that it 
was only a young animalcule attached by chance to a big 
one; but by nicer attention to the matter, I saw that it 
was a reproduction: for I observed that whereas the 
second animalcule, at the time when I first recognized 
that it really was one, had only four very short little 
1 A misinterpretation of the peristomial cilia. In Cothurnia it is very 
common to find 2 individuals (the products of fission) in the same house. 
2 Hydra—the first description of this organism. 
* The draughtsman—as will be evident—inadvertently depicted nine 
tentacles instead of eight: ef. Plate XXVIII, fig. 4. 
