Word: leeuwenhoek
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...cornerstone of 17th century scientific investigation; well aware of it, Vermeer laid out his paintings in a wizardly arrangement of planes, lines, cubes and cones. He also used the camera obscura, a forerunner of photography. In all probability, he was introduced to it by his fellow townsman Anton van Leeuwenhoek, inventor of a microscope, pioneer in optical research, and thought by some critics to be the young scholar portrayed in The Astronomer...
Anton van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), Dutch shopkeeper, amateur naturalist, microscope maker, the first human being to see microbes...
...magnificent instrument. In view of future developments, however, it has to be admitted at the same time, that with respect to its lenses in their present state, no more favorable comparison can be made than with the microscope as it was at the time of Leeuwenhoek...
Bible of the medieval schoolmen was Aristotle; when herbalists began to list plants unmentioned by him, Aristotle's omniscience was first challenged. The first microscopists - Malpighi, Swammerdam, Leeuwenhoek-added their heretical testimony. With Buffon and Reaumur, 18th Century France temporarily captured the blue ribbon of Science. Then Sweden's Linnaeus revolutionized the study of nature by his field-trip to Lapland, gave the world the Linnaean system, the first great attempt to classify plants. The unconsidered Lamarck, with his theory of ''the inheritance of acquired characteristics," was the forerunner of the evolutionists...
...Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), unlearned Dutch merchant's clerk, was first man to recognize bacteria and protozoa with a microscope. But not until Louis Pasteur did anyone explain the meaning of Leeuwenhoek's "little animals." Last year Clifford Dobell, English protistologist (student of unicellular organisms), nephew of the man who invented Dobell's Solution, after learning 17th Century Dutch to interpret bad contemporary Latin translations of Leeuwenhoek's unscientific Dutch, published a Leeuwenhoek biography (Harcourt, Brace, $7.50). Its Latin dedication translates: "This work of a dead Dutchman the English editor (as an animalcule...