308 LEEUWENHOEK AND HIS “ LITTLE ANIMALS” 
down upon him from the heights of his own wisdom, regards him 
as a greatly over-rated dilettante '—“ illiterate,” “ uncultured,” 
‘‘common to a degree ’’—and even goes so far as to aver that 
this “bourgeois satisfait . . . rather took a pride in the 
fact that he knew neither French, Latin, English nor German.” 
But I know of no evidence in support of such a statement, 
and it is clearly contradicted by the words “to my sorrow ”’ 
(tot mijn leetwesen) in the two foregoing extracts. 
Leeuwenhoek was always ready to confess his ignorance, but 
he was never proud of it. He would undoubtedly have said 
that nobody but a fool could pride himself on knowing less 
than other people. 
Although—as already remarked—Leeuwenhoek’s language 
presents few difficulties to his own countrymen, it must be 
confessed that to foreigners his words often appear at first 
sight very queer, and occasionally even enigmatic. But this 
is merely due to certain peculiarities of spelling and speech to 
which one soon becomes accustomed—peculiarities proper to 
his age and country, and not eccentricities or comicalities 
proper to himself. We see exactly comparable features in 
English of the same period, and inexperienced modern readers 
apparently tend to regard both as humorous. For example, I 
have seen people laugh at a grave sentence in Robert Hooke 
because the word “ guess” is spelled “ Ghesse”’: while Saville 
Kent refers to the ‘‘quaint style of diction” of Oldenburg’s 
excellent contemporary English translation of Leeuwenhoek’s 
Letter 18 merely, I believe, because it was not couched in the 
current English of 1880. Every serious student of Leeuwen- 
hoek and Hooke must realize at once, however, that there is 
nothing either “quaint” or “funny” about their phraseology 
or spellings—any more than there is about Tyndale’s English 
translation of the Gospel, or Spinoza’s Dutch writings on 
religion. 
The following few notes are not intended for Leeuwenhoek’s 
learned fellow-countrymen or for professional philologists, 
but for poor foreign scholars like myself—“‘illiterate”” and 
“‘c¢ommon’—who have no special knowledge of the peculiarities 
of his language, but who want to read and understand what 
he himself wrote. I design merely to give a few hints such 
1 “ dilettant”’ in Becking’s own Italian-Dutch-American-English. 
