A MICROBE PIONEER

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 23, 28 January 1939, Page 18 (Supplement)

A MICROBE PIONEER

THERE are indeed few who fail to take an interest in discoveries and explorations, or who are not fascinated with the adventures, hardships and persecutions of early explorers and pioneers.

Although the names of persons associated with famous discoveries and inventions are intimately known, there is one who is known by very few, yet whose discovery ranks among the most valuable.

This man, Anthony van Leeuwenhoi'k. one of the mret successful pioneer mic-roscopists. was born 306 years afro on October 24, 1032, at Delft. Holland, at a time when superstitions were rife and the world believed all such things as illness and disease were the work of evil spirits. Through his microscopical studies, beside discovering that weevils were hatched from insects' eggs deposited in wheat and not the wheat itself, as was the common belief, he was the first to lind tho?e little organisms which we inhale with every breath— some ferocious and deadly, others friendly and useful, many of them more important to mankind than any island or continent; those little creatures called bacteria, or known to everyone as germs.

When his father died Leeuwenhock was sent to school to become a Government official, but at the age of 16 he was apprenticed to a merchant in Amsterdam. Five years later he returned to his home town where he married and set up a drygoods business of his own.

During the next 20 years very little is known of him, but during that time he developed, a most fantastic desire for grinding lenses for examining small objects.

Leeuwenhock was most particular about his lenses, and not satisfied with grinding them equal to the best lens maker in Holland, he set out to produce superior. He spent hours ov ®r them, burning and blistering bis hands till at length he found a method to make lenses about onetenth of an inch across, so perfect and clear that they showed minute objects greatly magnified with wonderful definition. His neighbours firmly believed him to be insane, but this dry-goods dealer worked forgetful of his friends and family, using his self -made microscopes for "examining scores of different specimens.

By - - - Win Longbridge.

I He examined muscle fibres and »kin, peered for hours at the cellular formation of different plants, studied the structure of hairs of animals, and although hie researches were not conducted on any definite •scientific plan his powers of observation enabled him to make many and interesting discoveries. Dissecting flies, he examined their brains, admired with amazement the intricate detail of their tongues, and remarked "Impossible" when he first viewed the wonderful perfection in the legs of a flea.

His curiosity in examining different specimens seems as though it were necessary to prepare him for that certain day in 1668, when in order to test a lens he extracted from the

human moutli what lie regarded as promising material for his observa-

tions. What this wide-eyed observer saw that day starts this story. Can you imagine him looking for further specimens to test his newlymade instrument? In vain he searches, then suddenly he thinks of examining some saliva. "But what can there be in it?" he muses. Xot having used it before, however, he places some on '-he glass slip under the microscope and peers through the lens. He starts, looks closer, mumbles, then he shouts, "They move, thev swim, creatures 1000 'times smaller than I have ever seen." This was Leeuwenhock's day of days—he had entered a world within a world, where creatures had lived, bred and died unknown to man since the beginning of time. Organisms that had caused death and sickness to whole races of mankind 1.000.000 times larger than themselves. Beasts more terrible and dangerous than dragons or fire-spitting monsters had been discovered and looked upon for the first time. From then science has advanced and men huve been preparing for war against the most ferocious members of this invisible but implacable world. Doctors and specially trained men. using super-microscopes manufactured by some of the finest opticians in the world, carry on this study, helping to stamp out illness and disease which even a child knows have nothing to do with evil spirits, yet this man, Anthony van Leeuwenhoek, who pioneered with self-made instruments, is scarce remembered and is now almost as unknown as the strange little creatures were at their time of discovery. |