THE ENVOY 367 
published his discoveries. The organisms which Leeuwenhoek 
discovered were, for those times, of a ‘“Stupendious 
Smalness’’;* and there is good reason to believe that Kircher 
possessed no instruments capable of showing any objects of 
the order of magnitude of common bacteria. 
Singer (1914), however, has recently reasserted Léffler’s 
claims, and has attempted to support them with translated 
quotations from Kircher’s “ Experiments” with rotting flesh, 
leaves, and wood. ‘These are really too ridiculous to quote.” 
It is obvious—from Kircher’s own words—that he saw nothing 
but maggots, mites, and nematodes, such as anybody possessed 
of asimple low-power magnifying-glass can nowadays perceive. 
I have consulted all the passages on which Léoffler and Singer 
rely, and have repeated some of Kircher’s so-called experiments: 
and I have even read a considerable part of the Scrutiniwm 
Pestis and of the Ars Magna, and have made long search in 
Buonanni’s Micrographia Curiosa (1691) and Musaeum 
Kircherianum (1709). But the results have been incommen- 
surate with my labours. T'o me the Scrutiniwm Pestis appears 
as a farrago of nonsensical speculation by a man possessed of 
neither scientific acumen nor medical instinct.’ Kircher 
obviously had no conception of a real experiment—in the 
Baconian and modern sense. It is easy enough, of course, to 
tear a line here and there from his voluble writings, and to 
use it as evidence on his behalf: but if such lines be considered 
in their context they have a very different complexion. For 
instance, some recent authors have inferred that Kircher’s 
remarks about rats dying and decomposing at atime of plague 
show that he realized the relation of these rodents to plague- 
1 Grew (1701), p. 12. 
2 About ten years ago I had some correspondence with Dr Singer on 
this matter, and I then attempted to convince him of the error of his views. 
From his last letter to me on the subject I gather that he is no longer 
prepared to defend Kircher’s claim to the discovery of either the Bacteria or 
the Protozoa, and that he now accepts my interpretations. 
8 Kircher—who was a priest with no biological or medical training— 
had obviously derived most of his “ knowledge” from wide reading, and it 
seems to me not unlikely that in his vague references to ‘ worms”’ occurring 
in the blood of sick people he was merely harking back to the speculations 
of antiquity: for example, to the well-known passage where Pliny says 
“nascunturque in sanguine ipso hominis animalia exesura corpus ”’ 
(Hist. Nat., lib. XX VI, cap. xiii; ed. Genevae 1582, p. 488). 
