SWAMMERDAM’S EARLY YEARS. 
131 
His was a remarkable combination of mental endowments which, at 
the first glance, seem opposed to one another: a love of the great, and 
a taste for the subtlest researches; a sublimity of aim, and that ob¬ 
stinacy of analysis which would subdivide the atom, and yet never 
cry, “ Hold, enough ! ” But, in reality, are these qualities of so contra¬ 
dictory a nature ? By no means. Men whose hearts are filled with 
the love of Nature will declare that they harmonize admirably. 
Nothing great and nothing little. For the lover a simple hair is worth 
as much as, frequently more than, a world. 
He was born in a cabinet of natural history; and his birth decided 
his destiny. The cabinet, formed by his father, an apothecary of 
Amsterdam, was a pell-mell, a chaos. The child wished to arrange 
it, and drew up a catalogue of it. A modest ambition led him from 
point to point, until he became the greatest naturalist of the century. 
His father was one of the zealot collectors who then became common 
in Holland—insatiable treasurers of diverse rarities. It was not with 
pictures—though Bembrandt was then in his glory—it was not with 
antiquities, that he filled his house. But all that the ships brought 
back from the two Indies of minerals, plants, fantastic and extra¬ 
ordinary animals, he acquired at any cost, and heaped up in piles. 
These marvels of the unknown world, contrasting by their splendour 
and tropical magnificence with the gloomy climate which received 
them and the pale sea of the North, aroused in the young Hollander’s 
mind a lively curiosity and a passionate devotion to Nature. 
A very good Dutch painter has drawn a charming picture of the 
young Grotius: a universal scholar at twelve years of age, surrounded 
by folios, maps, charts, and all the appliances of learning. How much 
I should have preferred that the same artist—or rather the all-powerful 
magician, Bembrandt—had revealed to us the mysterious study, that 
brilliant chaos of the three kingdoms, and the young Swammerdam 
endeavouring to grasp the grand enigma! 
The crowds and prodigious movement of Amsterdam favoured his 
solitude. The Babylons of commerce are for the thinker profound 
deserts. In that dumb ocean of men of mercantile activity, on the 
border of sluggish canals, he lived almost like Bobinson Crusoe in his 
