increasingly visible and clear, enchanting. Looking through the microscope today, little animals still roam, twirl, spin, envelop smaller organisms. Technical language helps make sense of it all, but also contains the potential to strip the original mystery and aura from these invisible forms with which we remain taxonomic kin. Leeuwenhoek’s language—this marriage of casual and technical—was a model we would be good to recall in our modern experience with this connection.
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eeuwenhoek’s late December observation described over twenty ciliates of the genus Vorticella. Covered in short hairs, the creatures are bell-shaped, twist and stretch as the Dutchman described. Another such genus is Tetrahymena. Swimming among water in a petri dish, I’ve watched the organisms envelop and consume particles of algae and purple ink. The magnification of today’s technology is higher than the devices used by Hooke or Leeuwenhoek, but the sight remains similar. Textbooks explain that through the process we call phagocytosis, the organism absorbs nutrients into its vacuoles. Although true, it is equally captivating to watch their world unfold as the ciliates dart or inch around and absorb the green and purple masses, now visible through their transparent bodies. They bump into one another, avoid a neighbor, compete for food. They could be elephants grazing.
© Jamie K. Reaser
nology of pipes to explain the inner workings of plants. And to articulate the details of a cork, he took inspiration from the rooms of monasteries and coined the term “cell.” In contrast, Leeuwenhoek, although armed with a more powerful optic device, found this use of mechanical language and analogy unfulfilling. Instead, his descriptions of moving form, leisure, and beauty seemed fitting, appropriate for a world he pioneered. Like him, I struggle with the words to describe what my cornea cannot see on its own. Biology gives us a language, a naturalistic and mechanical template, with which to replace these comparisons and emotional responses. It gives us terms such as vacuole, flagella, cilia, sporangia, phagocytosis, chloroplasts. They explain and identify—they also set limits on what is appropriate. Observers in Leeuwenhoek’s time couldn’t—and perhaps refused to—see a divide between the casual and the technical, between the mechanical and the sensory. In this spirit of awe, they continued to use adjectives like beautiful, delightful, wondrous, the kind of words that first come to mind, in addition to the growing linguistic shift of the scientific era. Perhaps this was the draw of the magical space—phylogenetically or aesthetically—these little animals occupied in the popular and scientific imagination. Through the technology available to us, worlds have become
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