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the learned skeptics—who no longer believed in the magic virtues of unicorn's horns—and it bowled the learned body over! What! The Dutchman said he had discovered beasts so small that you could put as many of them into one little drop of water as there were people in his native country? Nonsense! The cheese mite was absolutely and without doubt the smallest creature God had created.

But a few of the members did not scoff. This Leeuwenhoek was a confoundedly accurate man: everything he had ever written to them they had found to be true. . . . So a letter went back to the scientific janitor, begging him to write them in detail the way he had made his microscope, and his method of observing.

That upset Leeuwenhoek. It didn’t matter that these stupid oafs of Delft laughed at him—but the Royal Society? He had thought they were philosophers! Should he write them details, or should he from now on keep everything he did to himself? "Great God," you can imagine him muttering, "these ways I have of uncovering mysterious things, how I have worked and sweat to learn to do them, what jeering from how many fools haven't I endured to perfect my microscopes and my ways of looking! . . ."

But creators must have audiences. He knew that these doubters of the Royal Society should have sweat just as hard to disprove the existence of his little animals as he himself had toiled to discover them. He was hurt, but—creators must have an audience. So he replied to them in a long letter assuring them he never told anything too big. He explained his calculations (and modern microbe hunters with all of their apparatus make only slightly more accurate ones!) he wrote these calculations out, divisions, multiplications, additions, until his letter looked like a child's exercise in arithmetic. He finished by saying that many people of Delft had seen—with applause!—these strange new animals under his lens. He would send them affidavits from prominent citizens of Delft—two men of