those of mammals circular. He reserved the name of 'globule' for those of the human body, erroneously believing them to be spheroidal.
Among his other discoveries bearing on physiology and medicine may be mentioned: The branched character of heart muscles, the stripe in voluntary muscles, the structure of the crystalline lens, the description of spermatozoa after they had been pointed out to him in 1674 by Hamen, a medical student in Leyden, etc. Richardson dignifies him with the title, 'The Founder of Histology,' but this, in view of the work of his great contemporary, Malpighi, seems to me an overestimate.
Turning his microscope in all directions, he examined water and found it peopled with minute animalcules, those simple forms of animal life, propelled through the water by innumerable hair-like cilia, extending from the body like banks of oars from a galley, except that in many cases they extend from all surfaces. He saw not only the animalcules, but also the cilia that move their bodies.
His descriptions of the various forms of these animalcules are interesting, and m strangely archaic language. Here is one of them, changed from Dutch into English:
"In the year 1675 I discovered living creatures in rain-water which had stood but four days in a new earthern pot, glazed blew within. This invited me to view this water with great attention, especially those little animals appearing to me ten thousand times less than those represented by Mons. Swammerdam, and by him called waterflies or waterlice, which, may be perceived in the water with the naked eye. The first sort by me discovered in the said water, I divers times observed to consist of five, six, seven or eight clear globules, without being able to discover any film that held them together or contained them. When these
animalcula, or living atoms, did move they put forth two little horns, continually moving themselves; the place between these two horns was flat, though the rest of the body was roundish, sharpening a little towards the end, where they had a tayle, near four times the length of the whole body, of the thickness (by my microscope) of a spider's web; at the end of which appeared a globule, of the bigness of one of those which made up the body; which tayle I could not perceive even in very clear water to be mov'd by them. These little creatures, if they chanced to light upon the least filament or string, or other such particle, of which there are many in the water, especially after it has stood some days, they stook entangled therein, extending their body in a long round, and striving to dis-entangle their tayle; whereby it came to pass, that their whole body lept back towards the globule of the tayle, which then rolled together serpent-like, and after the manner of copper or iron wire, that having been wound around a stick, and unwound again, retains those windings and turnings,"
[1] etc.
"Any one who has examined under the microscope the well-known bull animalcule will recognize in this first description of it the stalk
- ↑ 'Kent's Manual of the Infusoria.' Vol. 1, p. 3. Taken from the 'Philosophical Transactions' for the rear 1677.
