ANTONII DE LEEUWENHOEK.

can be said in a similar way about the individual globules of our blood. But in order to proceed further, after I have spoken thus far of the very smallest particles of salt, I think it necessary also to signify something with my pen that concerns the small particles of water: and this the more so, because not so long ago a certain Author spoke of the particles of water with such freedom and persuasion that whoever might happen to be the reader, perhaps unlearned, must necessarily imagine that there are huge little serpents which are taught to constitute water: but if anyone, I believe, were to place before the eyes of many men such a smallness of these little serpents, by which they far exceed a coarser sand divided into ten thousand myriads of parts, without doubt the whole thing will seem to them incredible, and which cannot be perceived: I myself can in no way imagine the parts of water to represent the figure of a serpent. For in whatever minute parts they may consist, they nevertheless always preserve a flexibility, whence it follows that they are capable of any figures whatsoever; especially if they are pressed by the air or other parts, and because with many parts of water gathered together, each one assumes a peculiar figure, so that they may unite more firmly, all however tending towards roundness, just as I have demonstrated before that the parts of fatty things fit themselves together. Let there be an example: let us imagine for ourselves a large number of sheep's or pigs' bladders, which indeed are full of water: These suspended in the air are all round, but thrown promiscuously into some cask, they are all because of their flexibility and weight so joined and compressed that no empty space is left in the cask: Each bladder will acquire a peculiar figure: yet for the greatest part tending to the round: wherefore when we have thought that such casks full of bladders are agitated and moved, it will also be necessary to believe that each bladder changes its figure with the lightest motion, according as it has been pressed more lightly by one or more heavily by another: The same happens to the globules of fat of our body, which by motion or pressure, which we excite in the body