“My determination is not to remain stubbornly with my ideas but I’ll leave them and go over to others as soon as I am shown plausible reasons which I can grasp. This is the more true since I have no other purpose than to place truth before my eyes so far as it is in my power to embrace it; and to use the little talent I have received to draw the world away from its old heathenish superstitions and to go over to the truth and to stick to it.” He was an amazingly healthy man, and at the age of eighty his hand hardly trembled as he held up his microscope for visitors to peep at his little animals or to exclaim at the unborn oysters. But he was fond of drinking in the evenings--as what Dutchman is not?--and his only ill seems to have been a certain seediness in the morning after such wassail. He detested physicians--how could they know about the ills of the body when they didn’t know one thousandth of what he did about the build of the body? So Leeuwenhoek had his own theories--and sufficiently foolish they were--about the cause of this seediness. He knew that his blood was full of little globules--he had been the first of all men to see them. He knew those globules had to go through very tiny capillaries to get from his arteries to his veins--hadn’t he been the man to discover those wee vessels in a fish tail? Well, after those hilarious nights of his, his blood got too thick to run properly from the arteries to the veins! So he would thin it! So he wrote to the Royal Society: “When I have supped too heavily of an evening, I drink in the morning a large number of cups of coffee, and that as hot as I can drink it, so that the sweat breaks out on me, and if by so doing I can’t restore my body, a whole apothecary’s shop couldn’t do much, and that is the only thing I have done for years when I have felt a fever.” That hot coffee drinking led him to another curious fact about the little animals. Everything he did led him to pry up some new fact of nature, for he lived wrapped in those tiny dramas that went on under his lenses just as a child listens open-mouthed with saucer eyes to the myths of Mother Goose.... He never tired of reading the same story of nature, there were always new angles to be found in it, the pages of his book of nature were thumbed and dog-eared by his insatiable interest. Years after his discovery of the microbes in his mouth one morning in the midst of his sweating from his vast curative coffee drinkings he looked once more at the stuff between his teeth-- What was this? There was not a single little animal to be found. Or there were no living animals rather, for he thought he could make out the bodies of myriads of dead ones--and maybe one or two that moved feebly, as if they were sick. “Blessed Saints!” he growled: “I hope some great Lord of the Royal Society doesn’t try to find those creatures in his mouth, and fail, and then deny my observations....”