block of material. “I took a good clear piece of cork,” he explained in Micrographia, “and with a pen-knife sharpened as keen as a razor, I cut a piece of it off, and thereby left the surface of it exceeding smooth, then examining it very diligently with a microscope, methought I could perceive it to be a little porous.” These pores or cells were not very deep but consisted of “a great many little boxes.” In short, this piece of cork was created out of a regular assemblage of polygonal structures with discrete, repetitive “units” that were collected together to form the whole. They resembled
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