Lordship sees fit.” By 1678, he published his article on the nature of the
“seed from the genitals of animals,” including drawings from the sperm of
rabbits and dogs, taking special care to write that when he examined his
own semen, “That what I am observing is just what nature, not by sinfully
defiling myself, but as a natural consequence of conjugal coitus ... ”^6
The truths of conception had been debated for thousands of years, and
the early microscopists eagerly sought to investigate what the constituent
parts of semen looked like. It was too difficult to determine what was
happening in the interior of the womb for these primordial scientists, but
the specter of the wriggling sperm, so similar to a tadpole or the
microscopic protozoa, all equipped with flagella for propulsion, was a
verity that had been guessed at since humans had been able to ponder,
“Where does life come from?” Just as important, the sperm did not look
like miniature animals ready to travel into a uterus. (At the advent of
microscopy, many wondered if they would find little puppies or kits in the
cells of dogs or rabbits.) The travelers, instead, looked like purpose-built
little machines, ready for a voyage into the womb, even if their
mechanism was hidden from the virtuosi’s insight.
As microscopy improved, an amazing transition occurred. As Bacon
had predicted decades before, the sequence of innovation would be to
catalogue, then sift, and then, with “suitable application of intellectual
machinery,” to arrive at a knowledge of invisible structures.^7 As Catherine
Wilson argues, “science destroys the image of the familiar world and
substitutes for it the image of a strange one, wonderful to the imagination
and at the same time resistant to the projection of human values.”^8 As new
realities came into view, scientists were forced to change ancient
conclusions and adopt new theories, but strangely, after a feverish half-
century of microscopic discovery, a lull settled over the minds of the
investigators of the infinitely small.
Regarding imagination, the Enlightenment author Bernard de
Fontenelle’s philosopher-hero observes that “... our minds are curious, and
our eyes bad ... we wish to know more than we can see ... Thus do true
philosophers pass their lives, in not believing that which they see, and in
endeavoring to divine that which they see not.”^9 The development of clear
glass, the innovation of lens manufacture, the assemblage of compound
microscopes, and the wide-ranging publications of the microscopic
illustrations eventually led to complacency. How many doodles of fleas,