SOME EARLY MICROSCOPISTS 



him : " Swammerdam's labours were superhuman. 

 Through the day he observed incessantly, and at 

 night described and drew what he had seen. By 

 six o'clock in the morning in summer he began to 

 find enough light to enable him to trace the minutiae 

 of natural objects. He was hard at work till noon, 

 in full sunlight, and bareheaded, so as not to 

 obstruct the light, and his head steamed with pro- 

 fuse sweat. His eyes, by reason of the blaze of light, 

 became so weakened that he could not observe 

 minute objects in the afternoon, for his eyes were 

 weary." If only for the fact that the Dutchman 

 made clear the processes involved in the transforma- 



^ tions of insects, his name would be famous. He 

 described the structure and habits of the hive bees, 

 male, female and drone with wonderful accuracy, 

 and illustrated his work with plates which " would 

 do credit to the most skilful anatomists of any age." 



/x Swammerdam was sarcastic at times ; he had shown 

 that the facets of a bee's eye are six-sided and, as 

 so commonly happened in those days, some natural- 

 ists jumped to a conclusion, in this case that the 

 fact explained the six-sidedness of the cells in the 

 honey comb. By the same reasoning Swammerdam 

 remarked that men, having round pupils, should 

 build round houses. It is not only for his study of 

 the minute structure of insects that this microscopist 

 is noted, he worked upon the tadpole and the snail. 



' He it was who discovered the red blood corpuscles 

 of the frog, and he described his discovery in the 

 following terms : ''In the blood I perceived the 



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