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.... [Illustration: ANTONY LEEUWENHOEK] “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.” IV 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-preserved 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-- [Illustration: (line drawing of microbes)]