• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

11

Science Under the Microscope: More Anglo–Dutch Misunderstandings

It was not only in matters concerning pendulum clocks and balance- spring watches that Christiaan Huygens interfered in the affairs of British scientific practitioners like Alexander Bruce and Robert Hooke. In this chapter I offer a further example of the way the story of scientific advance is altered once we recognise that a Dutchman, resident mostly in Paris, and an Englishman employed by the Royal Society, were effectively engaged in a long-range collaboration, in spite of the body of water, national ideologies and differences of temperament that separated them.

In this instance, the fortunes of a set of scientific ideas depend on the movement of a copy of a published book – Hooke’s Micrographia, or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries thereupon (1665). This reminds us that books moved around the Continent of Europe with a speed and efficiency that almost match those achieved by online booksellers today. In August 1655, for example, the antiquarian William Dugdale received a letter from Sir Edward Walker, Garter King of Arms and loyal servant of Charles II, exiled in Amsterdam. Walker congratulated Dugdale on his recently published antiquarian history book, a copy of which he had seen in the hands of a friend to whom Dugdale had sent a personal copy. In reply Dugdale wrote that ‘God be thanked that we have disposed of above 400 of these allready, (though it came out but in Easter Terme,) the one half whereof are gone beyond sea; but our money for them will not come in till ye next spring.’1

What this second example of Anglo–Dutch scientific interaction shows is the way our understanding of the trajectory of development in emerging science has tended to get deflected and sidetracked, because accounts of the scientific debate are overly preoccupied with the local communities – treated as enclosed and self-sufficient – in which those who played a leading role (in this case, the Dutchman Christiaan Huygens in Paris, and the Englishman Robert Hooke in London) worked at the time.

The end of this particular story also reminds us how political upheaval can dramatically alter the perceived importance of an individual’s work, and thus posterity’s opinion of its significance. At the Royal Society, the arrival of William III of Orange in England at the end of 1688 resulted in a significant reorganisation in every English institution, as we might expect when a foreign invasion is followed by long-term occupation. The result for the Society was a particularly dramatic version of ‘régime change’: the meteoric rise of figures hitherto of only middling importance within the institution, while others were swiftly and permanently marginalised, the significance of their scientific work downgraded and thenceforth diminished in importance in the historic records.

The design, manufacture and skilled use of microscopes, like that of clocks, developed very much in parallel, in the seventeenth century, in England and the United Provinces. To the Dutch goes the credit for initially perfecting a lens-based device which could provide a high level of magnification of objects too small to be appreciated using the naked eye.2

There is a measure of consensus amongst historians of science that the Dutch use of magnifying lenses originated in the hands of painters involved in creating ‘lifelike’ representations of natural phenomena, particularly plants and insects. The names regularly associated with the meticulous rendering of detail only accessible with a microscope are Jacob de Gheyn II and Joris Hoefnagel. Intriguingly for the present story, both men and their families were closely associated with the Huygens family. Sir Constantijn Huygens’s mother was a Hoefnagel, and he himself took lessons in miniature painting with a Hoefnagel uncle. The de Gheyns were neighbours in The Hague, and the young Jacob de Gheyn III was Constantijn