Microbe Hunters Page 2

  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 “swim about among one another gently like a swarm of mosquitoes in the air. . .”

  Of course this man was a groper. He was a groper and a stumbler as all men are gropers, devoid of prescience, and stumblers, finding what they never set out to find. His new beasties were marvelous but they were not enough for him, he was always poking into everything, trying to see more closely, trying to find reasons. Why is the sharp taste of pepper? That was what he asked himself one day, and he guessed: “There must be little points on the particles of pepper and these points jab the tongue when you eat pepper. . .”

  But are there such little points?

  He fussed with dry pepper. He sneezed. He sweat, but he couldn't get the grains of pepper small enough to put under his lens. So, to soften it, he put it to soak for several weeks in water. Then with fine needles he pried the almost invisible specks of the pepper apart, and sucked them up in a little drop of water into one of his hair-fine glass tubes. He looked—

  Here was something to make even this determined man scatter-brained. He forgot about possible small sharp points on the pepper. With the interest of an intent little boy he watched the antics of “an incredible number of little animals, of various sorts, which move very prettily, which tumble about and sidewise, this way and that!”

  So it was Leeuwenhoek stumbled on a magnificent way to grow his new little animals.

  And now to write all this to the great men off there in London! Artlessly he described his own astonishment to them. Long page after page in a superbly neat handwriting with little common words he told them that you could put a million of these little animals into a coarse grain of sand and that one drop of his pepper-water, where they grew and multiplied so well, held more than two-million seven-hundred-thousand of them. . .

  This letter was translated into English. It was read before 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 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 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.”

  4

  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-p
reserved 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 somersaults. There were some beings that moved sluggishly and looked like wee bent sticks, nothing more, but that Dutchman squinted at them till his eyes were red-rimmed—and they moved, they were alive, no doubt of it! There was a menagerie in his mouth! There were creatures shaped like flexible rods that went to and fro with the stately carriage of bishops in procession, there were spirals that whirled through the water like violently animated corkscrews. . .

  Everybody he could get hold of—as well as himself—was an experimental animal for that curious man. Tired from his long peering at the little beasts in his own mouth, he went for a walk under the tall trees that dropped their yellow leaves on the brown mirrors of the canals; it was hard work, this play of his, he must rest! But he met an old man, a most interesting old man: “I was talking to this old man,” wrote Leeuwenhoek to the Royal Society, “an old man who led a very sober life, who never used brandy nor tobacco and very seldom wine, and my eye chanced to fall on his teeth which were badly grown over and that made me ask him when he had last cleaned his mouth. I got for answer that he had never cleaned his teeth in his whole life. . .”

  Away went all thought of his aching eyes. What a zoo of wee animals must be in this old fellow's mouth. He dragged the dirty but virtuous victim of his curiosity into his study—of course there were millions of wee beasties in that mouth, but what he wanted particularly to tell the Royal Society was this: that this old man's mouth was host to a new kind of creature, that slid along among the others, bending its body in graceful bows like a snake—the water in the narrow tube seemed to be alive with those little fellows!

  You may wonder that Leeuwenhoek nowhere in any of those hundreds of letters makes any mention of the harm these mysterious new little animals might do to men. He had come upon them in drinking water, spied upon them in the mouth; as the years went by he discovered them in the intestines of frogs and horses, and even in his own discharges; in swarms he found them on those rare occasions when, as he says, “he was troubled with a looseness.” But not for a moment did he guess that his trouble was caused by those little beasts, and from his unimaginativeness and his carefulness not to jump to conclusions modern microbe hunters—if they only had time to study his writings—could learn a great deal. For, during the last fifty years, literally thousands of microbes have been described as the authors of hundreds of diseases, when, in the majority of cases those germs have only been chance residents in the body at the time it became diseased. Leeuwenhoek was cautious about calling anything the cause of anything else. He had a sound instinct about the infinite complicatedness of everything—that told him the danger of trying to pick out one cause from the tangled maze of causes which control life. . .

  The years went by. He tended his little dry-goods store, he saw to it the city hall of Delft was properly swept out, he grew more and more crusty and suspicious, he looked longer and longer hours through his hundreds of microscopes, he made a hundred amazing discoveries. In the tail of a little fish stuck head first into a glass tube he saw for the first time of all men the capillary blood vessels through which blood goes from the arteries to the veins—so he completed the Englishman Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood. The most sacred and improper and romantic things in life were only material for the probing, tireless eyes of his lenses. Leeuwenhoek discovered the human sperm, and the cold-blooded science of his searching would have been shocking, if he had not been such a completely innocent man. The years went by and all Europe knew about him. Peter the Great of Russia came to pay his respects to him, and the Queen of England journeyed to Delft only to look at the wonders to be seen through the lenses of his microscopes. He exploded countless superstitions for the Royal Society, and aside from Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle he was the most famous of their members. But did these honors turn his head? They couldn't turn his head because he had from the first a sufficiently high opinion of himself! His arrogance was limitless—but it was equaled by his humility when he thought of that misty unknown that he knew surrounded himself and all men. He admired the Dutch God but his real god was truth:

  “My determination is not to remain stubbornly with my ideas but I'll leave them and go over to others as soon as I am shown plausible reasons which I can grasp. This is the more true since I have no other purpose than to place truth before my eyes so far as it is in my power to embrace it; and to use the little talent I have received to draw the world away from its old heathenish superstitions and to go over to the truth and to stick to it.”

  He was an amazingly healthy man, and at the age of eighty his hand hardly trembled as he held up his microscope for visitors to peep at his little animals or to exclaim at the unborn oysters. But he was fond of drinking in the evenings—as what Dutchman is not?—and his only ill seems to have been a certain seediness in the morning after such wassail. He detested physicians—how could they know about the ills of the body when they didn't know one thousandth of what he did about the build of the body? So Leeuwenhoek had his own theories—and sufficiently foolish they were—about the cause of this seediness. He knew that his blood was full of little globules—he had been the first of all men to see them. He knew those globules had to go through very tiny capillaries to get from his arteries to his veins—hadn't he been the man to discover those wee vessels in a fish tail? Well, after those hilarious nights of his, his blood got too thick to run properly from the arteries to the veins! So he would thin it! So he wrote to the Royal Society:

  “When I have supped too heavily of an evening, I drink in the morning a large number of cups of coffee, and that as hot as I can drink it, so that the sweat breaks out on me, and if by so doing I can't restore my body, a whole apothecary's shop couldn't do much, and that is the only thing I have done for years when I have felt a fever.”

  That hot coffee drinking led him to another curious fact about the little animals. Everything he did led him to pry up some new fact of nature, for he lived wrapped in those tiny dramas that went on under his lenses just as a child listens open-mouthed with saucer eyes to the myths of Mother Goose. . . He never tired of reading the same story of nature, there were always new angles to be found in it, the pages of his book of nature were thumbed and dog-eared by his insatiable interest. Years after his discovery of the microbes in his mouth one morning in the midst of his sweating from his vast curative coffee drinkings he looked once more at the stuff between his teeth—

  What was this? There was not a single little animal to be found. Or there were no living animals rather, for he thought he could make out the bodies of myriads of dead ones—and maybe one or two that moved feebly, as if they were sick. “Blessed Saints!” he growled: “I hope some great Lord of the Royal Society doesn't try to find those creatures in his mouth, and fail, and then deny my observations. . .”

  But look here! He had been drinking coffee, so hot it had blistered his lips, almost. He had looked for the little animals in the white stuff from between his front teeth. It was just after the coffee he had looked there—Well?

  With the help of a magnifying mirror he went at his back teeth. Presto!! “With great surprise I saw an incredibly large number of little animals, and in such an unbelievable qu
antity of the aforementioned stuff, that it is not to be conceived of by those who have not seen it with their own eyes.” Then he made delicate experiment in tubes, heating the water with its tiny population to a temperature a little warmer than that of a hot bath. In a moment the creatures stopped their agile runnings to and fro. He cooled the water. They did not come back to life—so! It was that hot coffee that had killed the beasties in his front teeth!

  With what delight he watched them once more! But he was bothered, he was troubled, for he couldn't make out the heads or tails of any of his little animals. After wiggling forward in one direction they stopped, they reversed themselves and swam backward just as swiftly without having turned around. But they must have heads and tails! They must have livers and brains and blood vessels as well! His thoughts floated back to his work of forty years before, when he had found that under his powerful lenses fleas and cheese-mites, so crude and simple to the naked eye, had become as complicated and as perfect as human beings. But try as he would, with the best lenses he had, and those little animals in his mouth were just plain sticks or spheres or corkscrews. So he contented himself by calculating, for the Royal Society, what the diameter of die invisible blood vessels of his microbes must be—but mind you, he never for a moment hinted that he had seen such blood vessels; it only amused him to stagger his patrons by speculations of their unthinkable smallness.