The Publications

While the Dutch Golden Age has been studied exhaustively and we know much about the social, political, economic, and technological dynamics of the world that van Leeuwenhoek lived in, we know very little about the man -- his public or personal life. Only two portraits, some small medallions and seals, nine or ten microscopes, and a handful of legal and commercial documents have survived. However, from his letters, as well as letters by others about him, we know much about van Leeuwenhoek's character and personality.

As was common in the early days of scientific research, van Leeuwenhoek wrote letters to other researchers, hoog-edele heeren, high learned gentlemen, he called them. While communicating as he did with letters was very common at the time -- the Republic of Letters -- van Leeuwenhoek is unusual in that he wrote only letters, no articles, no books, although several hundred letters, all or in part, were published during his lifetime. Sorting through the published versions' various translations and editions is a perilous task, as you can see on the Letters page.

As detailed on the left, Van Leeuwenhoek found two ways to communicate his observations:

articles in the Royal Society's journals (see below)

self-publication in the original Dutch and in Latin translation (see left)

Lower in this column:

Royal Society | Philosophical Collections
Maty's Index | Cole's Bibliography and Index

The Complete Letters

Starting in 1939, an evolving committee of Dutch scientists has slowly made its way through all 300+ surviving letters.

Leeuwenhoek, A. van. Alle de Brieven / Collected letters. Edited and annotated by a committee of Dutch scientists. 15 Volumes. Amsterdam and Lisse: Swets and Zeitlinger, 1939–1999.

The editors (see table below right) state:

The aim of the project is to produce a critical edition of the text of van Leeuwenhoek’s letters with a modern English translation, with philological, historical and scientific annotations, internal references, and photos of drawings and engravings.

This illustrated and heavily annotated work has the Dutch on the left and the English on the right. Although the first two volumes used older translations, the subsequent volumes have all been freshly translated into English. An indispensable project, it has been led for the last thirty years by L.C. Palm, now working with the Huygens Instituut in Den Haag. Dr. Palm writes:

The aim is to have the mss of the parts yet to be published ready for printing at the end of 2008.

In 1999, the fifteenth volume in this nineteen-volume series was published. It has twenty-one letters written by van Leeuwenhoek between July 1704 and July 1707. Two thirds of the letters were written to the Royal Society in London as well as John Chamberlayne, who translated them for publication; others were written to Antonio Magliabechi and Francesco Corner.

That leaves the final seventeen years of letters and four volumes.

Fifteen volumes were published by CRC Press and then Swets and Zeitlinger until 2003. The first nine volumes were published by CRC in Amsterdam, and the most recent six, those of Drs. Palm, by Swets and Zeitlinger, Lisse, though all nine are often listed as published by only Swets and Zeitlinger. In any case, both CRC and Swets are now imprints of Taylor and Francis, the academic publishing arm of Informa. There is no indication that the series will continue.

These books are rare and expensive, upwards of $300 each when found used. They are listed as out of print and unavailable at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. It strikes me that this project is in the long tail and would be ripe for total digitization, all the existing volumes and the mss of the final four.

Another option is a library. World Cat lists 18 libraries in the U.S., Canada, and U.K. that have a complete collection up to volume 11 and only two libraries anywhere that report a complete set of 15 - the Natural History Museum in London and Universität Göttingen, Germany.

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Royal Society

Of the more than three hundred surviving letters, almost two hundred were sent to the Royal Society. Parts or all of about 116 of these letters -- by no means all of them -- were published in 107 articles in the Society's journal, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. One, the famous letter of September 17, 1683, about bacteria in the mouth, was published twice, nine years apart, in volumes 14 and 17, in different translations with slightly different illustrations. Even so, as shown on the chart on the right, van Leeuwenhoek's total number of articles made him, by far, the journal's most published author.

The articles are, for the most part, extracted or abstracted English translations except for six in Latin: one in 1677 about human sperm, one in 1720, and then the final four letters from 1722. Almost 60 of the titles have a form of the word waarneming, observation.

These letters and articles are discussed in detail beginning on the Letters page.

Birch's History

In 1756, Thomas Birch published History of the Royal Society of London in four volumes. Volume III documenting the years 1672 to 1679 and Volume IV, 1679 to 1687, can be downloaded from Google Books. It is less a history and more a transcription of the minutes of the meeting of the Society in often-frustrating summary, flat words concealing strong emotions.

Birch, Thomas. The history of the Royal society of London for improving of natural knowledge, from its first rise: In which the most considerable of those papers communicated to the society, which have hitherto not been published, are inserted in their proper order, as a supplement to the Philosophical Transactions. London: Millar, 1757.

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Hooke's Philosophical Collections

Henry Oldenburg was the founding editor of the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions. He paid for its printing out of his own pocket, in numbered pamphlets and yearly volumes until he died in 1677, having published almost 140 numbers since 1665 and almost completing volume 12.

Robert Hooke, the Society's unofficial (until 1682, then officially until 1702) curator of experiments, replaced Oldenburg as one of the Society's secretaries. He was not interested in continuing the journal on his own, nor could he afford to pay for it himself.

The other secretary, Nehemiah Grew, was willing to finish the final two numbers (141 and 141) of volume 12, but he took two years to do it. After that, the journal did not resume until 1683 with number 13.

Meanwhile, Hooke started his own journal, Philosophical Collections, in 1679, and published 7 numbers over the next two years.

Five of them had letters by van Leeuwenhoek, whose published letters dropped dramatically during these years. Hooke published two other van Leeuwenhoek letters in his Lectures and Collections of 1678, the second part of which, Microscopium, begins with the van Leeuwenhoek letters and Hooke's even longer response to van Leeuwenhoek's experiments.

Hooke, Robert. Lectures and collections: Cometa, Microscopium.
London, Printed for J. Martyn, 1678.

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Maty's Index

In the late 1700's, Paul Henry Maty, a secretary of the Society, created a general index to Philosophical Transactions, seventy volumes to that point. Maty lists all of van Leeuwenhoek's contributions, by volume, and the index is available complete from Google Books.

Maty, Paul Henry. A general index to the Philosophical transactions, from the first to the end of the seventieth volume. Royal Society, London, 1787. pdf

Dobell says (p. 389) that Maty has indexed "more or less accurately". Ten times, Maty breaks articles that are listed once in the journal's table of contents into multiple articles, one for each topic.

For example, this entry in the table of contents:

Extract of a Letter Written to the Publisher by Mr. Leewenhoeck from Delst, April 21. 1676; Concerning the Texture of Trees, and Some Remarkable Discovery in Wine; together with Some Notes Thereon

is two items on Maty's list, but both listed as starting on the same page, 653:

On the texture of trees, with notes thereon

A remarkable discovery in wine, which notes thereon

Thus, Maty has about ten more entries for van Leeuwenhoek, 122, than the journal's actual tables of contents, which has 111 (and is missing the famous Berkelse Meer letter of September 7, 1674).

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Cole's Bibliography and Index

Sorting out van Leeuwenhoek's publication history is a daunting task. Until now, the best list of van Leeuwenhoek's letters is F. J. Cole's bibliography published between Dobell's biography of 1932 and volume 1 of the Alle de Brieven / Collected Letters in 1939.

Cole F. J. Leeuwenhoek's zoological researches. Part II. Bibliography and analytical Index. Annals of Science, Volume 2, Issue 2 April 1937, pages 185 - 235.

Cole notes that his article lists and indexes only letters published during van Leeuwenhoek's lifetime by the Royal Society and by van Leeuwenhoek himself. Even though Alle de Brieven / Collected Letters attempts to collect all the letters, the planned nineteen-volume series is stalled at volume 15 and 1707.

Cole lists the letters by date, and then the bibliographic reference in one or more of four sources: van Leeuwenhoek's self-published Dutch and Latin versions, the Philosophical Transactions, and finally Hoole's Select Works. Cole also lists the several dozen early letters not published anywhere, some until the late 1800's and then the "lost" fourteen in 1931 by Dobell, as he discusses on p. 356 of his biography of van Leeuwenhoek.

You can learn more about the letters and articles on the Letters page.