“Life lives on life--it is cruel, but it is God’s will,” he pondered. “And it is for our good, of course, because if there weren’t little animals to eat up the young mussels, our canals would be choked by those shellfish, for each mother has more than a thousand young ones at a time!” So Antony Leeuwenhoek accepted everything and praised everything, and in this he was a child of his time, for in his century searchers had not yet, like Pasteur who came after them, begun to challenge God, to shake their fists at the meaningless cruelties of nature toward mankind, her children.... He passed eighty, and his teeth came loose as they had to even in his strong body; he didn’t complain at the inexorable arrival of the winter of his life, but he jerked out that old tooth and turned his lens onto the little creatures he found within that hollow root--why shouldn’t he study them once more? There might be some little detail he had missed those hundred other times! Friends came to him at eighty-five and told him to take it easy and leave his studies. He wrinkled his brow and opened wide his still bright eyes: “The fruits that ripen in autumn last the longest!” he told them--he called eighty-five the autumn of his life! Leeuwenhoek was a showman. He was very pleased to hear the ohs and ahs of people--they must be philosophical people and lovers of science, mind you!--whom he let peep into his sub-visible world or to whom he wrote his disjointed marvelous letters of description. But he was no teacher. “I’ve never taught one,” he wrote to the famous philosopher Leibniz, “because if I taught one, I’d have to teach others.... I would give myself over to a slavery, whereas I want to stay a free man.” “But the art of grinding fine lenses and making observations of these new creatures will disappear from the earth, if you don’t teach young men,” answered Leibniz. “The professors and students of the University of Leyden were long ago dazzled by my discoveries, they hired three lens grinders to come to teach the students, but what came of it?” wrote that independent Dutchman. “Nothing, so far as I can judge, for almost all of the courses they teach there are for the purpose of getting money through knowledge or for gaining the respect of the world by showing people how learned you are, and these things have nothing to do with discovering the things that are buried from our eyes. I am convinced that of a thousand people not one is capable of carrying out such studies, because endless time is needed and much money is spilled and because a man has always to be busy with his thoughts if anything is to be accomplished....” That was the first of the microbe hunters. In 1723, when he was ninety-one years old and on his deathbed, he sent for his friend Hoogvliet. He could not lift his hand. His once glowing eyes were rheumy and their lids were beginning to stick fast with the cement of death. He mumbled: