Secrets of Nature Discovered

[found in] beer, I was able to discover, although they were indeed small globules, six of which make up one globule, and which in some places lay next to each other in twos, threes, or fours, so that they touched each other only at their tiny surfaces. Seeing this, I imagined that the globules could not be formed correctly here, because syrups are too thick, and great agitations Leeuwenhoek uses "agitation" to describe the physical movement caused by the release of gases during fermentation. cannot occur in syrups as they do in wine or beer. I believed that just as the sweetness of wine or beer vanishes through agitation or fermentation—and the globules themselves are the sweetness (even though the globules, as globules, emit no sweetness of their own)—in the same way, fermenting syrups lose their sweetness and acquire a slightly sour taste, as I later learned from an Apothecary pharmacopola.

From these observations, I also began to think about water, especially because at various times I had found, among other particles in recently fallen rainwater, globules of the same size as those that make up one-sixth of a blood globule. I reasoned that if I could keep the water in constant motion, these small particles would soon coagulate and form globules similar in size and shape to the globules of blood, wine, beer, and so on. I therefore prepared several types of glass vessels, all equally effective, one of which resembled Fig: 1. A B C D. I left only a single opening at A, and the rest, from C to B, I filled with rainwater that I had collected for this purpose as it fell fresh from the sky. My reasoning was that the air trapped inside the glass sphere D would move all the water in the glass tube at the slightest change in the external air; just as I have often seen a mass of air no larger than a grain of sand cause great movement when trapped in water. To this end, I placed these glasses in my study musæo original: "musæo"; Leeuwenhoek's "museum" was his private laboratory where he kept his microscopes and conducted experiments. in front of the window, where they were exposed to the Sun for nearly the whole morning. Even the wind, hitting the windowpane, reached them. Furthermore, I positioned the glass tube at an angle...

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