The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Hooke looked further and deeper for small, independent living units invisible to the naked eye. At a Royal Society assembly in November 1677, he described his microscopic observations on rainwater. The society recorded his observations: The first experiment there exhibited was the pepper-water, which had been made with rain-water… put whole into it about nine or ten days before. In this Mr. Hooke had all week discovered great numbers of exceedingly small animals swimming to and fro. They appeared the bigness of a mite through a glass, that magnified about a hundred thousand times in bulk; and consequently, it was judged, that they were a hundred thousand times less than a mite. Their shape was to appearance like a very small clear bubble of an oval or egg form; and the biggest end of this egg-like bubble moved foremost. They were observed to have all manner of motions to and fro in the water; and by all, who saw them, they were verily believed to be animals; and that there could be no fallacy in the appearance.