Antonie van Leeuwenhoek
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Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek was a Dutch microbiologist and microscopist in the Golden Age of Dutch art, science and technology. A largely self-taught man in science, he is commonly known as "the F
Portrait by Jan Verkolje, after 1680
Van Leeuwenhoek's birth house at Oosteinde, before it was demolished in 1926
The Geographer by Johannes Vermeer
A microscopic section of a one-year-old ash tree (Fraxinus) wood, drawing made by Van Leeuwenhoek
Animalcule
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Animalcule is an archaic term for microscopic organisms that included bacteria, protozoans, and very small animals. The word was invented by 17th-century Dutch scientist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek to ref
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek
…letters were translated into Latin or English by Henry Oldenburg, who had learned Dutch for this very purpose. He was also the first to use the word animalcules to translate the Dutch words that Leeuwenhoek used to describe microorganisms. Despite the initial success of Van Leeuwenhoek's relationship with the…
A 1795 illustration of van Leeuwenhoek's animalcules by an unknown artist