The Leeuwenhoek Lecture 1970 Airborne microbes: their significance and distribution

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Abstract
Under the date 9 October 1676 Antony van Leeuwenhoek wrote a letter to Henry Oldenburg about the Protozoa. It was read to this Society in February of the following year, and contained reference to claims that someone in Rome had seen extraordinarily small living creatures hovering in the air. ‘For my part wrote van Leeuwenhoek, ‘notwithstanding the manifold observations made by me on the subject, I have up till now seen no smaller animalcules moving in the air than those which are so big that we can easily discern them with our naked eye..'