Words matter. These are the best Antonie van Leeuwenhoek Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
No one can pretend to say that a fish is ever killed by heat, for many kinds of fish, in the middle of summer, and in the burning heat of the sun, do either play, as it were, on the surface of the water, or hide themselves under the leaves, weeds, or other substances at the bottom.
If any person examines by the microscope that part towards the extremity of the spider’s body from whence its thread proceeds, he will observe the spot to be, as it were, surrounded by five several protuberances or risings, each ending in a point and altogether forming a kind of enclosure.
Life lives on life – it is cruel, but it is God’s will. And it is for our good, of course, because if there weren’t little animals to eat up the young mussels, our canals would be choked by those shellfish, for each mother has more than a thousand young ones at a time!
For my part, I would say that the male sperm and seeds of plants have been penetrated so far that there is nothing further to discover in this great secret, but I could err in my opinion.
I have oft-times been besought, by divers gentlemen, to set down on paper what I have beheld through my newly invented microscopia, but I have generally declined.
How inscrutable and incomprehensible are the hidden works of Nature!
For my part, I hold it equally impossible for a small shellfish to be produced without generation as for a whale to have its origin from the mud.
I have lately examined water, in which beaten pepper was steeped, and found two sorts of animals for shape, and each of those sorts to contain greater and smaller kinds: the greater I supposed the elder, the less the younger.
I have often endeavoured to view the circulation of the blood in terrestrial animals, but without success, by reason that no parts of their bodies were sufficiently transparent.
Just as the supposed number may differ from the true number by fully 100, 150, or even 200 in a flock of 600 sheep, so may I be even more out of my reckoning in the case of these very little animalcules.
How little do we discover in comparison of those things which now are and forever will be hidden from our sight? The whole of which I am fully persuaded no one will ever be able to dive into, and to explain their causes and effects.
Whenever I found out anything remarkable, I have thought it my duty to put down my discovery on paper, so that all ingenious people might be informed thereof.
