Buffon's Natural History, Volume 03 (of 10): Containing a Theory of the Earth, a General History of Man, of the Brute Creation, and of Vegetables, Minerals, &c. &c.Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de
History
Buffon's Natural History, Volume 03 (of 10): Containing a Theory of the Earth, a General History of Man, of the Brute Creation, and of Vegetables, Minerals, &c. &c.
Buffon, Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de
Natural history
We shall observe in the third place, that if we compare the figures
_a, b, c, d_, (PLATE III.) copied from the Philosophical Transactions,
with those which Leeuwenhoek had engraved many years after, (PLATE IV.)
we shall find considerable difference, especially in the figures of
the dead animals, of a rabbit and in those of a dog, (which plate we
have also copied for the satisfaction of our readers) from all which
we may conclude, that Leeuwenhoek has not always observed objects
entirely alive: that the moving bodies, which he looked upon as
animals, appeared to him under different forms; and that he has varied
in his assertions, with a view of making the species of men and animals
perfectly consistent; he has not only varied in the basis of these
experiments, but even in the manner of making them, for he expressly
says, that he always diluted the liquor with water, in order to
separate, and to give more motion to these animalcules: nevertheless,
in his letter to Lord Brouncker, he says, that having mingled an equal
quantity of rain water with the seminal liquor of a dog, in which he
had before perceived an infinity of living animalcules, yet the mixing
of this water killed them. The first experiment of Leeuwenhoek's
therefore was made, like mine, without any mixture; and it even seems,
that he was not of opinion to mix any water with the liquor till a
long time after; because he thought he had discovered, by his first
essay, that water caused the death of the animalculæ; which however is
not the fact. I think that the mixture of the water only dissolves the
filaments very suddenly; for I have seen but very few filaments in all
the experiments I have made after mixing the water with the seminal
liquor.
As soon as Leeuwenhoek was persuaded that spermatic animals were
transformed into men, and other animals, he imagined he saw two sorts
in the seminal liquor of every animal, the one male, and the other
female; and this difference, according to him, served not only for the
generation of themselves, but for the production of males and females,
which was very difficult to conceive by a simple transformation. He
speaks of the male and female animalcule, in his letter printed in the
Philosophical Transactions, No. 145, and in many parts of his works,[U]
but he does not describe the difference of these male and female
animalcules, and which in fact never existed but in his own imagination.
[U] See vol I. page 163, and vol. III. page 101, of his works.
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