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most honest visitor didn't touch anything—or filch anything. . . .

"But your instruments are marvelous!" cried Molyneux. "A thousand times more clear they show things than any lens we have in England!"

"How I wish, Sir," said Leeuwenhoek, "that I could show you my best lens, with my special way of observing, but I keep that only for myself and do not show it to any one—not even to my own family."

Those little animals were everywhere! He told the Royal Society of finding swarms of those sub-visible beings in his mouth—of all places: "Although I am now fifty years old," he wrote, "I have uncommonly well-preserved teeth, because it is my custom every morning to rub my teeth very hard with salt, and after cleaning my large teeth with a quill, to rub them vigorously with a cloth. . . ." But there still were little bits of white stuff between his teeth, when he looked at them with a magnifying mirror. . . .

What was this white stuff made of?

From his teeth he scraped a bit of this stuff, mixed it with pure rain water, stuck it in a little tube on to the needle of his microscope, closed the door of his study—

What was this that rose from the gray dimness of his lens into clear distinctness as he brought the tube into the focus? Here was an unbelievably tiny creature, leaping about in the water of the tube "like the fish called a pike." There was a second kind that swam forward a little way, then whirled about suddenly, then tumbled over itself in pretty somer-