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there. For twenty years after that very little is known about him, except that he had two wives (in succession) and several children most of whom died, but there is no doubt that during this time he was appointed janitor of the city hall of Delft, and that he developed a most idiotic love for grinding lenses. He had heard that if you very carefully ground very little lenses out of clear glass, you would see things look much bigger than they appeared to the naked eye. . . . Little is known about him from twenty to forty, but there is no doubt that he passed in those days for an ignorant man. The only language he knew was Dutch—that was an obscure language despised by the cultured world as a tongue of fishermen and shop-keepers and diggers of ditches. Educated men talked Latin in those days, but Leeuwenhoek could not so much as read it and his only literature was the Dutch Bible. Just the same, you will see that his ignorance was a great help to him, for, cut off from all of the learned nonsense of his time, he had to trust to his own eyes, his own thoughts, his own judgment. And that was easy for him because there never was a more mulish man than this Antony Leeuwenhoek!

It would be great fun to look through a lens and see things bigger than your naked eye showed them to you! But buy lenses? Not Leeuwenhoek! There never was a more suspicious man. Buy lenses? He would make them himself! During these twenty years of his obscurity he went to spectacle-makers and got the rudiments of lens-grinding. He visited alchemists and apothecaries and put his nose into their secret ways of getting metals from ores, he began fumblingly to learn the craft of the gold- and silversmiths. He was a most pernickety man and was not satisfied with grinding lenses as good as those of the best lens-grinder in Holland, they had to be better than the best, and then he still fussed over them for long hours. Next he mounted these lenses in little oblongs of copper or silver or gold, which he had extracted himself, over hot fires, among strange smells and fumes. To-day searchers pay seventy-five dollars for a fine shining microscope, turn the