400 
Notes on Portrait-plates 
Delphis. (4) Leeuwenhoek (1792), Opera omnia seu Arcana Naturae, Leyden; also transla¬ 
tion by Hoole (1798-1800). (5) Plimmer (1913), the President’s address: “Bedellus im- 
mortalis,” Journ. Roy. Microsc. Soc. pp. 121-135. (6) Nuttall (1917), Parasitology, x. 104, 
171 (gives citations). (7) Dobell (1920), The discovery of the intestinal Protozoa of man. 
Proc. Roy. Soc. Med. xm. 1-15. Biographical notes on Leeuwenhoek will be found in most 
of the dictionaries. 
Francesco Redi 
1626-1697. 
(Portrait-plate II, facing p. 96.) 
Redi was born 18 February, 1626, at Arezzo in Tuscany. He was of noble 
family. He took the degrees of M.D. and Ph.D. at Pisa and became chief 
physician to Grand Duke Ferdinand II and later to Cosimo III in Florence. 
A man of broad culture, he took a leading position in science and letters; his 
genius being universally recognised. A collection of sixty of his poems was 
published by Prince Ferdinand of Tuscany in 1702. During the last nine years 
of his life he suffered much from epilepsy, his death occurring suddenly in 
the night of February 28th to March 1st, 1697, when he was with the Court at 
Pisa. He was accorded a public funeral and was buried in the church of San 
Francesco at Arezzo where his nephew, the bailiff Gregorio Redi, erected a 
handsome monument to him bearing the brief inscription: “Francesco Redi 
Patricio Aretino Gregorius Fratris Films.” 
We cannot enter into Redi’s activities as a physician. It should be noted, 
however, that he was the first to experiment with snake venom, finding that 
the venom is innocuous when taken by the mouth, and most toxic when it 
enters the circulation. 
As a naturalist he was best known through his admirable researches upon 
the generation of insects and his observations on parasites. He (1668) ex¬ 
ploded the old and widespread belief in the spontaneous generation of maggots 
in meat by protecting meat from blowflies by means of gauze and thereby 
laid the foundation for the belief omne vivum ex vivo. Parasites had been also 
supposed to be spontaneously generated and therefore Redi next turned his 
attention to these and found that sexual generation was not confined to 
higher animals as commonly believed. He found intestinal worms in which 
the two sexes occurred, that they laid eggs and he described (1684), amongst 
others, the reproductive organs of Ascaris of man. His treatise deals with the 
helminthology of various animals, not merely with worms occurring in the 
gut but likewise with worms living in the kidneys of mammals, air sacs of 
birds and the natatory sac of fish. He studied the parasites of the lion, bear, 
seal, eagle, mole, etc. and extended his investigations to Invertebrata (Cepha- 
lopods and Crustacea). Redi is therefore one of the fathers of parasitology, he 
was the first to make consecutive observations on Entozoa of animals and his 
researches were the first to stimulate scientific men to devote their attention 
to parasitic worms. F. de Filippi (1837), when he discovered the larva of 
Fasciola hepatica in Planorbis nitidus named it Redia in honour of Redi, who 
