The Faber Book of Science (6 page)
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Authors: John Carey
Robert Hooke (1635–1703) was curator of experiments at the Royal Society. An astronomer, physicist and naturalist, he assisted Robert Boyle in constructing the first air pump. His
Micrographia
(1665)
contains the earliest illustrations of objects enlarged under the microscope – the crystal structure of snowflakes, a louse, a flea, a weevil, etc. It also contains the first scientific use of the word ‘cell’, to describe the microscopic honeycomb cavities in cork.
Only about half the world’s spiders spread webs to catch prey. The rest hunt or ambush. Hooke’s description reflects his close observation of the natural world.
The hunting spider is a small grey spider, prettily bespecked with black spots all over its body, which the microscope discovers to be a kind of feathers, like those on butterflies’ wings or the body of the white moth. Its gait is very nimble, by fits, sometimes running and sometimes leaping, like a grasshopper almost, then standing still and setting itself on its hinder legs. It will very nimbly turn its body and look round itself every way. It has six very conspicuous eyes, two looking directly forwards, placed just before; two other, on either side of those, looking forward and sideways; and two other about the middle of the top of its back or head, which look backwards and sidewards. These seemed to be the biggest. The surface of them all was very black, spherical, purely polished, reflecting a very clear and distinct image of all the ambient objects, such as a window, a man’s hand, a white paper, or the like.
Hooke discussed hunting spiders with his friend, the English traveller, virtuoso and diarist John Evelyn (1620–1706) who sent him the following description of their behaviour in Italy. Evelyn’s brown spider is evidently a different species from Hooke’s (which is grey). He identifies it as one of the wolf spiders
(Lupi).
These belong to the family Lycosidae (the family to which the Tarantula and the common wolf spider
Pardosa
amentata,
which can often be seen in English gardens sunbathing on rockeries, both belong). They
get their name because they chase after their prey like wolves, and there are over 2,500 known species.
Of all the sorts of insects, there is none has afforded me more divertisements than the Venatores, which are a sort of Lupi, that have their dens in the rugged walls and crevices of our houses; a small, brown and delicately spotted kind of spiders, whose hinder legs are longer than the rest.
Such I did frequently observe at Rome, which espying a fly at three or four yards distance, upon the balcony (where I stood) would not make directly to her, but crawl under the rail, till being arrived to the Antipodes, it would steal up, seldom missing its aim; but if it chanced to want anything of being perfectly opposite, would at first peep immediately slide down again, till, taking better notice, it would come the next time exactly upon the fly’s back. But if this happened not to be within a competent leap, then would this insect move so softly, as the very shadow of the gnomon [the upright arm of a sundial] seemed not to be more imperceptible, unless the fly moved; and then would the spider move also in the same proportion, keeping that just time with her motion, as if the same soul had animated both those little bodies; and whether it were forwards, backwards, or to either side, without at all turning her body, like a well managed horse: But if the capricious fly took wing, and pitched upon another place behind our huntress, then would the spider whirl its body so nimbly about, as nothing could be imagined more swift; by which means she always kept the head towards her prey, though to appearance as immovable as if it had been a nail driven into the wood, till by that indiscernible progress (being arrived within the sphere of her reach) she made a fatal leap (swift as lightning) upon the fly, catching him in the pole [head], where she never quitted hold till her belly was full, and then carried the remainder home. I have beheld them instructing their young ones how to hunt, which they would sometimes discipline for not well observing. But when any of the old ones did (as sometimes) miss a leap, they would run out of the field, and hide them in their crannies, as ashamed, and haply not be seen abroad for four or five hours after.
Source: Robert Hooke,
Micrographia
(1665).
The belief that imbibing blood from another person can restore youth and vigour is very ancient, and there were many early attempts to put it into practice. In 1492 Pope Innocent VIII, when weak and in a coma, was given the blood of three young men, all of whom died. How the blood was administered is not known: probably by mouth.
After Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood (see p. 17) the possibility of transferring blood directly from the arteries of the donor to the veins of the recipient through a tube was investigated both in France and in England. On 14 November 1666
the minutes of the Royal Society record that:
The experiment of transfusing the blood of one dog into another was made before the Society by Mr King and Mr Thomas Coxe, upon a little mastiff and a spaniel, with very good success, the former bleeding to death, and the latter receiving the blood of the other, and emitting so much of his own as to make him capable of receiving the other.
Samuel Pepys, a member of the Society, missed this experiment, but heard about it, and followed the fortunes of the surviving dog, reporting in his diary on 28 November that it was still ‘in perfect good health’. The experiment had been masterminded by Robert Boyle, who explored the possible psychological effects of transfusion in a series of questions to the Society – whether a fierce dog could be tamed by receiving blood from a cowardly dog; whether a transfused dog would recognize its master, etc.
The first English blood transfusion into a human being took place on 23 November 1667. The Royal Society tried to procure ‘some mad person in the hospital of Bedlam’ for the purpose, but the Keeper of Bedlam declined, so the choice fell on Arthur Coga, a ‘very freakish and extravagant’ Bachelor of Divinity from Cambridge who, being ‘indigent’, was persuaded by a fee of one guinea to volunteer. The Society’s secretary, Henry Oldenburg, recorded the result in a letter to Boyle.
On Thursday next, God willing, a report will be made of the good success of the first trial of transfusion practised on a man, which was by order of the Society, and the approbation of a number of
physicians, performed on Saturday last in Arundel House, in the presence of many spectators, among whom were Mr Howard and both his sons, the bishop of Salisbury, four or five physicians, some parliament men, etc., by the management and operation of Dr Lower and Dr King, the latter of whom performed the chief part with great dexterity, and with so much ease to the patient, that he made not the least complaint, nor so much as any grimace during the whole time of the operation; in which the blood of a young sheep, to the quantity of about eight or nine ounces by conjecture, was transmitted into the great vein of the right arm, after the man had let out some six or seven ounces of his own blood. All which was done by the method of Dr King’s, which I published in Num. 20 of the Transactions, without any change at all of it, save only in the shape of one of the silver pipes, for more conveniency. Having let out, before the transfusion, into a porringer, so much of the sheep’s blood, as would run out in about a minute (which amounted to twelve ounces) to direct us as to the quantity to be transfused into the man, he, when he saw that florid arterial blood in the porringer, was so well pleased with it, that he took some of it upon a knife, and tasted it, and finding it of a good relish, he went the more couragiously to its transmission into his veins, taking a cup or two of sack before, and a glass of wormwood wine and a pipe of tobacco after the operation, which no more disordered him, both by his own confession, and by appearance to all bystanders, than it did any of those that were in the room with him. The pipe being taken out of the man, the blood of the sheep ran a very free stream, to assure the spectators of an uninterrupted course of blood.
The patient found himself very well upon it, his pulse better than before, and so his appetite. His sleep good, his body as soluble as usual, it being observed, that the same day of his operation he had three or four stools, as he used to have before. This morning our president (who by very pressing business could not be present in Arundel House) and I sent to see him pretty early, and found him a bed, very well, as he assured us, and more composed, as his host affirmed, than he had been before.
Coga wrote an account of his operation in Latin, and read it to the Society. Pepys, who was present, concluded that he was ‘cracked a little in his head, though he speaks very reasonably and very well’. A second transfusion, this time of 14 ounces of sheep’s blood, was given to Coga on 12 December 1667.
Once more, he survived apparently unharmed. However, a patient of the French pioneer of blood transfusion Jean Denis, who taught medicine at Montpellier, died following a transfusion in 1668, and this put a stop to transfusion into humans until the discovery of blood-group antigens and antibodies in 1900 made the practice safer. Blood transfusion was first practised on a large scale in the First World War.
The courtiers and literati persistently ridiculed the Society’s experiments, headed by Charles II who ‘mightily laughed’ (Pepys relates) to hear that the scientists were ‘spending time only in weighing of air’. (Boyle’s epoch-making experiments on the pressure and volume of gases seem to be what excited the royal mirth on this occasion.) Thomas Shadwell’s play
The
Virtuoso,
first performed in 1676, presents Sir Nicholas Gimcrack boasting of his exploits in blood transfusion:
I assure you I have transfus’d into a human vein 64 ounces, avoirdupois weight, from one sheep. The eminent sheep died under the operation, but the recipient madman is still alive. He suffer’d some disorder at first, the sheep’s blood being heterogeneous, but in a short time it became homogeneous with his own … The patient from being maniacal or raging mad became wholly ovine or sheepish: he bleated perpetually and chew’d the cud; he had wool growing on him in great quantities; and a Northamptonshire sheep’s tail did soon emerge or arise from his anus or human fundament.
Sources: From Pepys’s
Diary
and the
Proceedings
of
the
Royal
Society
via Marjorie Hope Nicolson,
Pepys’s
Diary
and
the
New
Science,
Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 1965.
Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) was the first human being to see living protozoa and bacteria. The son of a basket-maker in Delft, Holland, he received little education, but became a prosperous linen-draper. His friends included the painter Jan Vermeer. Drapers used magnifying glasses to inspect cloth, and van Leeuwenhoek took to grinding his own lenses from glass globules, and constructing microscopes. With these he observed protozoa and bacteria in fresh water, in the bile of various animals, in the human mouth, and in his own excrement. He nearly blinded himself watching the explosion of gunpowder under a microscope. His descriptions, communicated to the Royal Society in London in a series of 190 letters spanning 50 years, are so precise that modern bacteriologists can identify with certainty many of the micro-organisms he saw. In this extract from a letter dated 7 September 1674, he announces his first sighting of ‘little animals’ in water.
About two hours distant from this Town there lies an inland lake, called the Berkelse Mere, whose bottom in many places is very marshy, or boggy. Its water is in winter very clear, but at the beginning or in the middle of summer it becomes whitish, and there are then little green clouds floating through it; which, according to the saying of the country folk dwelling thereabout, is caused by the dew, which happens to fall at that time, and which they call honey-dew. This water is abounding in fish, which is very good and savoury. Passing just lately over this lake, at a time when the wind blew pretty hard, and seeing the water as above described, I took up a little of it in a glass phial; and examining this water next day, I found floating therein divers earthy particles, and some green streaks, spirally wound serpent-wise, and orderly arranged [identified as the common green alga Spirogyra: the earliest recorded observation of this organism], after the manner of the copper or tin worms, which distillers use to cool their liquors as they distil over. The whole circumference of each of these streaks was about the thickness of a hair of one’s head. Other particles had but the beginning of the foresaid streak; but all consisted of very small green
globules joined together: and there were very many small green globules as well. Among these there were, besides, very many little animalcules, whereof some were roundish, while others, a bit bigger, consisted of an oval. On these last I saw two little legs near the head, and two little fins at the hindmost end of the body. Others were somewhat longer than an oval, and these were very slow a-moving, and few in number. These animalcules had divers colours, some being whitish and transparent; others with green and very glittering little scales; others again were green in the middle, and before and behind white; others yet were ashen grey. And the motion of most of these animalcules in the water was so swift, and so various upwards, downwards, and round about, that ’twas wonderful to see: and I judge that some of these little creatures were above a thousand times smaller than the smallest ones I have ever yet seen, upon the rind of cheese, in wheaten flour, mould, and the like.
Source:
Antony
van
Leeuwenhoek
and
His
‘Little
Animals’,
ed. trans. and introduced by Clifford Dobell, New York, Russell & Russell Inc., 1958.