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God, one notary public, and eight other persons worthy to be believed. But he wouldn't tell them how he made his microscopes.

That was a suspicious man! He held his little machines up for people to look through, but let them so much as touch the microscope to help themselves to see better and he might order them out of his house. . . . He was like a child anxious and proud to show a large red apple to his playmates but loth to let them touch it for fear they might take a bite out of it.

So the Royal Society commissioned Robert Hooke and Nehemiah Grew to build the very best microscopes, and brew pepper water from the finest quality of black pepper. And, on the 15th of November, 1677, Hooke came carrying his microscope to the meeting—agog—for Antony Leeuwenhoek had not lied. Here they were, those enchanted beasts! The members rose from their seats and crowded round the microscope. They peered, they exclaimed: this man must be a wizard observer! That was a proud day for Leeuwenhoek. And a little later the Royal Society made him a Fellow, sending him a gorgeous diploma of membership in a silver case with the coat of arms of the society on the cover. "I will serve you faithfully during the rest of my life,” he wrote them. And he was as good as his word, for he mailed them those conversational mixtures of gossip and science till he died at the age of ninety. But send them a microscope? Very sorry, but that was impossible to do, while he lived. The Royal Society went so far as to dispatch Doctor Molyneux to make a report on this janitor-discoverer of the invisible. Molyneux offered Leeuwenhoek a fine price for one of his microscopes—surely he could spare one?—for there were hundreds of them in cabinets that lined his study. But no! Was there anything the gentleman of the Royal Society would like to see? Here were some most curious little unborn oysters in a bottle, here were divers very nimble little animals, and that Dutchman held up his lenses for the Englishman to peep through, watching all the while out of the corner of his eye to see that the undoubtedly