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FIRST OF THE MICROBE HUNTERS
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Maybe? Well, there was only one way to find out where they came from. "I will experiment!" he muttered.

He washed out a wine glass very clean, he dried it, he held it under the spout of his eaves-trough, he took a wee drop in one of his hair-fine tubes. Under his lens it went. . . . Yes! They were there, a few of those beasts, swimming about. . . . "They are present even in very fresh rain water!" But then, that really proved nothing, they might live in the eaves-trough and be washed down by the water. . . .

Then he took a big porcelain dish, "glazed blue within," he washed it clean, out into the rain he went with it and put it on top of a big box so that the falling raindrops would splash no mud into the dish. The first water he threw out to clean it still more thoroughly. Then intently he collected the next bit in one of his slender pipes, into his study he went with it. . . .

"I have proved it! This water has not a single little creature in it! They do not come down from the sky!"

But he kept that water; hour after hour, day after day he squinted at it—and on the fourth day he saw those wee beasts beginning to appear in the water along with bits of dust and little flecks of thread and lint. That was a man from Missouri! Imagine a world of men who would submit all of their cocksure judgments to the ordeal of the common-sense experiments of a Leeuwenhoek!

Did he write to the Royal Society to tell them of this entirely unsuspected world of life he had discovered? Not yet! He was a slow man. He turned his lens onto all kinds of water, water kept in the close air of his study, water in a pot kept on the high roof of his house, water from the not-too-clean canals of Delft and water from the deep cold well in his garden. Everywhere he found those beasts. He gaped at their enormous littleness, he found many thousands of them did not equal a grain of sand in bigness, he compared them to a cheese-mite and they were to this filthy little creature as a bee is to a horse. He was never tired with watching them

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