THEE ENVOY 365 
little help—even had he seen their works. Moreover, there 
are no descriptions of protozoa or bacteria in any of these 
publications—so far as I have been able to ascertain. I have 
studied them all with care, but have sought information on 
such organisms in them in vain. I believe they contain none, 
and nobody (to my knowledge) has yet proved that they do. 
Nobody now claims that Fabri or Stelluti or Power or Hooke 
discovered the Protozoa or the Bacteria: but a half-hearted 
claim has recently been made for Borel by Singer (1915), so 
I cannot altogether ignore it here. 
Borel (1656) tells us that “worms” are said to be found in 
the blood of people suffering from “ fever”’,' though he makes no 
claim to have seen such things himself. Yet Singer says” that 
to him “It seems . . . highly probable that he caught a 
glimpse of infusoria and possibly bacteria, for he assures us that 
all decomposing material swarms with similar worms.” Singer 
gives no exact reference to the passage on which he relies, but 
apparently alludes to Borel’s Observatio de Sanguine ; in which 
he does not give any such assurance, but merely says it zs 
probable that worms would be found in every decomposing 
material if attention were paid to it.’ The whole passage is 
clearly hypothetical. As a prophecy it may have some interest 
for helminthologists: for the protozoologist or bacteriologist it 
is obviously without significance. Something more than a 
misreading or mistranslation of Borel’s words is surely needed 
to prove that he forestalled Leeuwenhoek. 
Another claim to priority in the discovery of the Bacteria 
has been put forward for the German Jesuit priest Athanasius 
Kircher (1602-1680)—well known as a voluminous and reckless 
writer on all manner of subjects.* I do not pretend to have 
1 Certo etiam refertur, in sanguine febricitantium vermes reperiri. 
2 Singer (1915), p. 338. Singer’s references to Borel are not always 
easy to follow. In two places, indeed, he appears to confuse Borel’s work 
of 1656 with his earlier publication of 1653. But this—so far as I can 
discover—contains only one trivial reference to the use of the “ engyscope”’ 
[= microscope], having no bearing on the present subject. Borel’s later 
observation (1656a, p. 198) on “ whale-like insects in human blood ’’—to 
which Singer also alludes—cannot conceivably refer to either protozoa or 
bacteria. 
3 quare verisimile est idem in omni re, dum putrefit, contingere, si animad- 
vertatur (Borel, 1656; Obs. III, p. 8). 
4 Cf. Nouv. Biogr. Gén., XXVII, 769, and Allg. Dtsch. Biogr., XVI, 1. 
