The Letters

van Leeuwenhoek's publishing history
with the Royal Society's
Philosophical Transactions

Antony van Leeuwenhoek wrote only letters, hundreds of them. He wrote them in Dutch, the only language that he knew. These letters, his complete scientific work, are our only access to his work and ideas.

Many of his letters were published, at least in part, in English translation. Others were collected and published in pamphlets and books by van Leeuwenhoek, in the original Dutch and in Latin translation, with irregular paginations and different illustrations. Many of the English translations were then translated into French and published in the French Academy's Journal des Scavans. At the end of Dobell's biography, his discussion of van Leeuwenhoek's letters reveals the "grievous difficulty" of grappling with all the versions published during van Leeuwenhoek's lifetime. Frank Egerton calls it a "bibliographic nightmare".

While I can't make this situation any less complex, I hope to make it clear, at least, on this page, the Publications page, and the Bibliography page.

In the 1670's, van Leeuwenhoek made what we now consider his most important discoveries: protozoa, bacteria, red blood cells, and sperm. Even ten years earlier, his best way to tell anyone would have been to send "learned letters" to the people scattered around Europe who seemed interested in such things. Perhaps they would find his observations worth copying and passing on to other learned friends.

Knowing no language other than Dutch, especially Latin, van Leeuwenhoek would have been severely limited as a participant in this primitive knowledge network.

By 1673, fortunately, van Leeuwenhoek had another outlet, what we now call the "learned society". The Royal Society in London, the first, was a more organized knowledge network using the latest technology, the printing press.

In London

The Royal Society, a radical, upstart group housed in Gresham College, preached experiment and observation, not theory. The members advocated Francis Bacon's inductive reasoning based on observation and experiment. Their meetings featured live demonstrations of experiments by Curator of Experiments Robert Hooke.

According to Sprat's History, they rejected:

amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style ... bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness, as they can: and preferring the language of Artizans, Countrymen, and Merchants, before that, of Wits and Scholars.

This learned society produced a journal, the first of its kind. Every month, several articles were published and once a year, they were collected into a volume. Around 1,200 of each monthly number were printed and distributed throughout the world. This journal, Philosophical Transactions, was edited and paid for by its founding editor, Henry Oldenburg. It was the one and only place where, at that time, the plain-speaking, monolingual, uncredentialed, non-theoretical foreigner van Leeuwenhoek, very much the outsider, could tell the world about the wriggling, swimming things, the multitude of little animals, that he was seeing through his tiny lenses.

The Royal Society had been meeting for thirteen years when they got van Leeuwenhoek's first letter in 1673. The Society had an early triumph with Hooke's Micrographia in 1665 and it survived founding editor Henry Oldenburg's imprisonment for espionage in 1667. Philosophical Transactions was beginning its eighth year of publication in 1673:

giving some accompt of the present undertaking, studies, and labours of the ingenious in many considerable parts of the world.

The next fifty years of van Leeuwenhoek's relationship with the Royal Society is divided into seven periods. This web has a page discussing each period in more detail, linked to the dates on the table on the right.