Wrote letter of 1721-01-24 (AB 357) to members of the Royal Society about vessels in wood from Ambon (Indonesia), oakwood, and pinewood, the muscle fibres of a cow, a whale, and a mouse, and the structure of a red blood cell
Standard reference information Collected Letters number:
Collected Letters volume:
Leeuwenhoek's summary Leeuwenhoek did not publish any letters after 1718 in book form with his own summaries. The summary below comes from Alle de Brieven / Collected Letters .
In this letter, L. discusses vessels in wood from Ambon (Indonesia), oakwood, and pinewood. He discusses the muscle fibres of a cow, a whale, and a mouse as well as the structure of a red blood cell.
Reception in London A contemporary English translation of the letter by James Jurin is to be found in London, Royal Society, MS 2115, Early Letters L.4.64; 6 pages.
The letter was read during the 1 February 1721/2 (O.S.) meeting of the Royal Society; Royal Society, Letter Book Original, 15.73.
Notes The letter is written in an unknown hand. Only the signature and the postscript are written by L. himself. The writer may have taken dictation from Leeuwenhoek, but probably made a fair copy of Leeuwenhoek’s manuscript. In any event, the writer/copyist used very few capital letters, his punctuation did not distinguish a comma from a period, and he did not start a new paragraph very often. The punctuation in Alle de Brieven / Collected Letters has been modernized and the paragraphing follows the text as printed in Philosophical Transactions . The same copyist also wrote Letter 365 of 13 June 1722.
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