Anatomy and Contemplation

of vinegar, appeared before my eyes, as I have proposed in Fig. A, No. 1, which terminated in a point on both sides; in the middle of many was an oblong and brown shape: others of the same shape shone like crystal, as Fig. B shows, which were also very numerous. Other corpuscles were oblong and brown, in whose brown color a certain clear light appeared, as Fig. C demonstrates. On the other side appeared oval shapes, though indeed few, some of which represented the light of an oval shape, as Fig. D teaches. Among the enumerated Figures, A, B, and D, I often seemed to myself to see many endowed with some cavity, as if we were looking at the form of some ship, and sometimes such a one appeared to me, which I said to be of the first shape, of which one half was brown, but the other was very translucent: sometimes also the corpuscles rested upon each other, as I demonstrated in Fig. E. Sometimes certain corpuscles occurred that made up only half of the shapes A, B, or C, as Fig. F teaches. Many corpuscles of all the mentioned shapes were by far the smallest, so that by their smallness they clearly escaped sight. These enumerated corpuscles, which I call the salt of vinegar, were found in the vinegar in such abundance that they amounted to several thousands, which number I detected in a small drop of vinegar, and besides that, an indescribable number of small globules, which I judged to consist of such magnitude that six of them would make the size of one blood globule. Besides this number, I observed a still much larger number of smaller globules: the last kind was so small that 36 of them would constitute one blood globule: to finish the matter in a word, it seemed incredible and imperceptible that such a multitude of particles could be contained in so small a quantity of liquid, especially one as clear as vinegar is. I conclude that all the parts enumerated so far, which I call the salt of vinegar, are those sharp and prickling parts that induce upon the tongue that sensation or flavor which we call acid. And although I have discovered these parts to be of this magnitude through an ordinary microscope, I did not doubt that they are far smaller than the smallest ones expressed here, and that these shapes, both large and small, are formed only from a great number of smaller particles that have the same shape, just as it has often been permitted for me to observe when I view seawater or common water, in which common salt has been dissolved, through a microscope; for from it emerge elegant, small, and quadrangular shapes so tiny that ten thousand times a thousand of them would not equal the size of a coarse grain of sand: which minute particles of salt, as soon as I behold them with my eyes, grow in size on all sides, yet still retaining their elegant quadrangular surface. And hence I conclude and assume as a certainty that I find no sharp particle in vinegar that is not composed of a great number of such small particles.

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