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ABSTRACT
Robert Hooke played important roles in the early development of the Royal Society of London. As Curator of Experiments of the Society, he became a pioneering microscopist, prolific inventor, astronomer, geologist, architect, and an effective surveyor of the City of London following the Great Fire of 1666. Hooke's Micrographia (1665) revealed the microscopic structures of numerous biological and inorganic objects and became an important source of information for later studies. Aside from the body of detailed observations reported and depicted in Micrographia, the Preface is in itself an extraordinary document that exhibits Hooke's fertile mind, philosophical insights, and rare ability to look into the future.
What Galileo's Sidereus Nuncias had done for the telescope and its heavenly vistas, Hooke's Micrographia now did for the microscope. Just as Galileo did not invent the telescope, neither did Hookc invent the microscope. But what he described seeing in his compound microscope awakened learned Europe to the wonderful world within. . . .
- Daniel J. Boorstin (1986)
MICROGRAPHIA, PUBLISHED BY ROBERT HOOKE in 1665, is one of the great classics of science. It was the first publication that illustrated objects as seen in a microscope, and it included the first accurate description and depiction of a microorganism, the microfungus Mucor (Figure 1). Hooke's discovery of a microorganism was made long before Antoni van Leeuwenhoek reported the existence of bacteria and other single-cell microbes. It has become clear that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Leeuwenhoek's initial microscopic observations were not made in isolation, but were based on findings and technical details in Hooke's Micrographia (Ford 1991; Gest 2004 a, 2004b,).
Hooke's description of Mucor was one of 60 detailed "Observations," many of which were of diverse biological objects such as the head of a fly, a flea, an ant, the sting of a bee, the teeth of a snail, hair, surfaces of leaves, and a thin section of cork tissue. Hooke observed that cork and other plant tissues consisted of "a great many little Boxes," for which he introduced the word cells. He estimated that there were more than 1 million cells in a square inch of cork tissue. Since Hooke had broad interests in nature, he used Micrographia to speculate on a variety of topics including: "Of...