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What he saw that day starts this history. Leeuwenhoek was a maniac observer, and who but such a strange man would have thought to turn his lens on clear, pure water, just come down from the sky? What could there be in water but just—water? You can imagine his daughter Maria—she was nineteen and she took such care of her slightly insane father!—watching him take a little tube of glass, heat it red-hot in a flame, draw it out to the thinness of a hair. . . . Maria was devoted to her father—let any of those stupid neighbors dare to snigger at him!—but what in the world was he up to now, with that hair-fine glass pipe?

You can see her watch that absent-minded wide-eyed man break the tube into little pieces, go out into the garden to bend over an earthen pot kept there to measure the fall of the rain. He bends over that pot. He goes back into his study. He sticks the little glass pipe onto the needle of his microscope. . . .

What can that dear silly father be up to?

He squints through his lens. He mutters guttural words under his breath. . . .

Then suddenly the excited voice of Leeuwenhoek: "Come here! Hurry! There are little animals in this rain water. . . . They swim! They play around! They are a thousand times smaller than any creatures we can see with our eyes alone. . . . Look! See what I have discovered!"

Leeuwenhoek's day of days had come. Alexander had gone to India and discovered huge elephants that no Greek had ever seen before—but those elephants were as commonplace to Hindus as horses were to Alexander. Cæsar had gone to England and come upon savages that opened his eyes with wonder—but these Britons were as ordinary to each other as Roman centurions were to Cesar. Balboa? What were his proud feelings as he looked for the first time at the Pacific? Just the same that Ocean was as ordinary to a Central American Indian as the Mediterranean was to Balboa. But Leeuwenhoek? This