134 SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. PT. IIL 



CHAPTER XVII. 



SCIENCE OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY (CONTINUED). 

 Malpighi Leeuwenhoeck Grew Ray and Willughby. 



Use of the Microscope by Malpighi, 1661. We have 

 now fairly left behind us the first fifty years of the seven- 

 teenth century; indeed, the experiments of Boyle and 

 Mayow were all made after 1650. But I wish especially 

 to remind you in this place that we have just begun the 

 second half of the century, because it will help you to re- 

 member an important study which began very quietly about 

 this time, but which has in the end opened out to us an 

 entirely new world of discovery. In the year 1609, at the 

 beginning of the century, Galileo brought distant worlds into 

 view by the use of the telescope ; and in like manner in the 

 year 1661, or about the middle of the century, Malpighi, 

 by the use of the microscope, revealed the wonders of infinitely 

 minute structures, or parts of living bodies ; enabling men 

 to see fibres, vessels, and germs, which were as much 

 hidden before by their minuteness as the moons of Jupiter 

 had been by their distance. It is not quite certain who 

 invented the compound microscope (/XIK/OOS, little ; o-KOTreto, 

 / look at). Huyghens, who was born in 1629, tells us 

 that he was informed by eye-witnesses that his country- 

 man Drehelius made them in 1621, and this was probably 

 about the time they were first used. Their application 



