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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 19 Jul 2023

Taken: 19 Jul 2023

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From •
EYE OF THE BEHOLDER •
Laura Snyder •
Authoress •

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this photo by Dinesh

Johannes Verkoljie, portrait of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, ca.1686. Leeuwenhoek, at fifty-four, is shown with a pair of dividers, a globe, and what might be a map -- the tools of a surveyor. (Wellcome Library, London)

J.Garcia, Malik Raoulda, Marco F. Delminho have particularly liked this photo

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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
Leeuwenhoek is staring through a flat, oblong brass holder about three inches long. In the center of the holder is a tiny glass head he made himself – how he did so, whether by grinding the lens or by blowing it from molten glass, is a secret that Leeuwenhoek has jealousy guarded. Attached to the back of the strange device is a thin metal rod supporting a small glass tube that contains a drop of water taken from the Berkelse Mere, an inland lake located a two hours walk from delft. Pressing the metal holder close to one eye – so that it is almost touching his face – in order to peer at the water in the tube through the glass bead, Leeuwenhoek is shocked to see not a clear pool, but a veritable aquarium filled with minuscule, swimming creatures – about a thousand times smaller than the tiniest cheese mites, he reckons. Some of these “little animals” are shaped like spirally wounded serpents, some are globular, others elongated ovals; he records “the motion of . . . these animalcules in the water was so swift, and so various, downwards, and round about, that I confess I could not but wonder at it. Leeuwenhoek has just discovered a new world never before even imagined: the microscopic world. ~ page 2

About two leagues from Delft, Leeuwenhoek began, there is “an Inland-Sea, called Berkelse-Lake In the winter the water is clear, but in the summer becomes whitish, with small green clouds floating within it.. . . .

Once he brought a sample of water home, Leeuwenhoek would have gone to his study and closed all the shutters except one, through which a beam of sunlight entered the dark room. He would have put a drop of water into a glass tube affixed to the back of one of his microscopes, lifting the device to his eyes in the direction of sunbeam. Screwing the specimen pin attached to the tube p and down, back and forth, he would have focused the instrument until the initially fuzzy image became clear . . . .

The sight that so rattled Leeuwenhoek what a multiplicity of tiny particles of different shapes (not all of them globular) and sizes and colours. Unbelievably, the particles were moving – and seemed to be moving themselves, by the use of minuscule legs and fins and hairs. These shapes were, therefore, living beings – living beings that had never even been imagined to exist.

Imagine the shock of realizing, for the first time, that water contains a whole world of living creatures completely invisible to naked eye. Leeuwenhoek must have looked again at the water without the microscope just to confirm that his eyes alone saw nothing. . . . . Trying to convey to his readers the infinitesimal size of these creatures, Leeuwenhoek estimated that they were, as he put it, “about a thousand times smaller than the smallest ones, which I have hitherto seen in the rind of cheese, wheaten flower, mold, and the like.” a thousand times smaller than any previously observed creatures, even creatures observed with a microscope.

In the history of civilization, this discovery must rank high on the list of radical transformations of our view of our world, and our place within it – even higher, perhaps than Copernicus’s claim that Earth is a planet, like the others, and does not have any special status at the liberal center of the universe. What Leeuwenhoek had just realised is that there exists a new world of living beings, a world never before seen, never before even imagined – a world in the water we drink, perhaps even in the food we eat – even, it will turn out, inside our own bodies. This discovery would have profound implications for fields as diverse as medicine, brewing, literature, biology, anatomy, and microscopy. But first, it would have to be noticed and accepted as true. ~ Page 251/252/253 (excerpts)

EYE OF THE BEHOLDER
10 months ago. Edited 10 months ago.
 Malik Raoulda
Malik Raoulda club
Admirable et excellent portrait joliment partagé avec ce magnifique Clair-Obscur.
Bonne et agréable fin de semaine clémente.
10 months ago.
 J.Garcia
J.Garcia club
Reinventation of Seeing
Splendid book and very well sharing, Dinesh
10 months ago.

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