Wrote Letter 30 of 1680-04-05 (AB 57) to Robert Hooke

April 5, 1680
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The original manuscript on three quarto pages, written and signed by Leeuwenhoek, is preserved at the Royal Society (MS. 1881. L 1. 52).


The figures of a rat's testicle in a jar of water and a little animal that came from it were the only two figures illustrating this letter. The originals were in ink and are preserved in the Royal Society's archives. In the text, these figures appeared together on a separate unnumbered plate in both the Dutch and the Latin editions. The scans on the left sidebar are from the 1686 first edition of Levende Dierkens.

Leeuwenhoek wrote in the letter that he drew Figure 1 "as far as it was feasible to me" (so veel het mij doenlijk was). He had someone else draw the far more complex Fig. 2 for him: "I caused it to be drawn" (ick heb laten afteijckenen).