ANTONII DE LEEUWENHOECK.

of vinegar could induce another shape upon the saline parts, to whom, however, both wine and vinegar are very harmful; the daily use of vinegar has never harmed me, nor, as I think, has my body contracted any inconvenience from it. But whenever I enjoy one pint of wine (it contains twenty ounces) in the evening, immediately through the night a fever afflicts me (if it is permitted to call the movement of the heart and the pulse, stronger than ordinary, a fever), and especially when the wine is sweet and generous: the cause of which thing I think to be that many sweet particles existing in wine, attenuated by heat and water, migrate together into my blood, and thicken it in some way, whence its circulation is retarded, becoming the cause of a more vehement and faster pulsation of the heart, concerning which thing I have dealt more lengthily heretofore. However, such is not the nature of our common salt and other salts. For any grain of our common salt put into water is divided into myriads of parts, yet representing an elegant quadrangular shape. But if much salt is dissolved in water, and part of the water evaporates, then the salt will combine again into larger fragments or parts and will be coagulated. And I remember, as I proposed before, that I see in our common salt parts that are smaller by more than a thousand myriads than a grain of sand, yet retaining their shape of elegant and quadrangular. Nor can these least of all saline particles be transferred from our stomach or intestines into the blood and other parts of the body, as I think, unless one of these minutiae or atoms of salt is divided again into innumerable other smallest ones. Indeed, I am persuaded that even if I see a saline particle representing no more than 1/1,000,000 part of a larger grain of sand, if this is divided again into a thousand myriads of particles, each particle will be elegantly square. This will seem wonderful to many: but let us call to mind the animalcules microscopic organisms that are found in ordinary waters and our excrements, which are not even 1/1,000,000 part of one