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In the early 1670s, a Dutch cloth merchant named Antonie van Leeuwenhoek began grinding tiny glass lenses of extraordinary quality. Though he had no formal scientific training, his curiosity led him to examine droplets of pond water, rainwater, and scrapings from his own teeth under these single-lens instruments. To his astonishment, he saw countless minuscule creatures swimming and tumbling in the liquid, organisms far too small for the unaided eye to detect. He called them animalcules. When he described these findings in letters to the Royal Society in London, many members were sceptical, for no one had reported such a hidden world before. Eventually, however, his careful observations were confirmed, and Leeuwenhoek is now remembered as one of the founders of microbiology.

Although he lacked any formal scientific —trainingwealthambition, Leeuwenhoek used his finely ground lenses to reveal a world of tiny organisms he named animalcules; the Royal Society at first received his reports with —scepticismenthusiasmindifference, but his observations were later confirmed.