Free A Brief History of Creation by Bill Mesler

had by then become one of the most famous men in the world. He had discovered hosts of microbial creatures. He was the first person to see spermatozoa in semen, and he was one of the first to see blood flow through capillaries, which he described in great detail. He had even described things as small as a single cell. In a 1692 essay on the state of microscopy, Hooke complained that the field had been “reduced almost to a single Votary, which is Mr. Leeuwenhoek; besides whom I hear of none that make any other Use of that Instrument except for Diversion and Pastime.”
    The accolades were never enough for the Dutchman. Even into his later years, van Leeuwenhoek complained to anyone who would listen about the ill treatment that had greeted his earliest and greatest discoveries. He kept working into old age and continued his correspondence with the Royal Society and others. But even those letters often betrayed a kind of bitterness that had long since passed being appropriate. He would frequently provide lists of “witnesses” to confirm even the most mundane observations, even though his reputation was, by then, long beyond reproach.
    By 1723, van Leeuwenhoek was suffering from increasingly violent lung spasms that made it hard for him to breathe. He began writing about his condition in a series of letters to the Royal Society. Though blind by then in one eye, he accompanied these letters with microscopic investigations of the midsections of sheep and oxen. Physicians attributed his episodes to a bad heart, but van Leeuwenhoek thought their diagnosis wrong. It turned out the doctors were, indeed, mistaken. Van Leeuwenhoek had a rare condition called respiratory myoclonus, which would later come to be commonly known as Leeuwenhoek’s disease.
    He had a friend translate his last two letters to the Royal Society into Latin, one of the languages he had never mastered. The letters had a certain macabre character. Approaching ninety years of age, van Leeuwenhoek knew he was dying, yet he approached his end very clinically. One of his letters described a fit that lasted three days, “during which time mystomach and guts ceased to perform their office and motion, so that I was persuaded I stood at death’s door.”
    Van Leeuwenhoek’s condition gradually worsened. By August 1723, he was dead. He was buried in a cemetery in Delft, just yards from the grave of Hugo Grotius, the religious theorist whose ideas had formed the theological underpinning of the Methodist and Pentecostal movements, and one of the most important figures in the history of the Netherlands.
    Van Leeuwenhoek left his most prized possession to the Royal Society: a beautiful black-lacquer box that housed twenty-six silver microscopes, upon which he had permanently affixed specimens, all arranged like the “cabinets of curiosities” that were so popular during the era. On receipt, a clerk at the Royal Society dutifully recorded the contents in almost poetic fashion: “The eye of a Gnat . . . Globules of Blood, from which its Redness proceeds . . . The Vessels in a leaf of Tea . . . The Organ of Sight of a Flie.” The bequest was accompanied by a letter from a friend of van Leeuwenhoek asking that, upon receipt of the cabinet, the society send word to van Leeuwenhoek’s daughter, Maria, “a spinster of excellent repute, who has preferred a single life to matrimony, in order that she might ever continue to serve her father.” In 1739, Maria van Leeuwenhoek had a small monument erected to her father in the cemetery where he lay. Six years later, she was buried by his side. She had never married.
    Antonie van Leeuwenhoek is remembered as the “father of” a host of scientific disciplines and subdisciplines—most important among them, microbiology. * That he began as merely a simple tradesman makes his accomplishments all the more extraordinary. After his work was done, the world became a much grander