Abstract
Microbiology, like most scientific disciplines, has advanced by observations, asking interesting questions, and developing techniques to understand these observations and answer these questions. Microbiology began with the discovery by Antony van Leeuwenhoek in 1674 of protozoa in freshwater and in 1683 of a wide variety of bacteria in the human mouth. Between 1653 and 1673, Leeuwenhoek developed the curious hobby of constructing microscopes. Although he was not the first to build a microscope, his microscopes were the finest of that time. Leeuwenhoek patiently improved his microscopes and techniques of observation for 20 years before he reported his results in the form of letters, written in “Nether-Dutch,” to the Secretary of the Royal Society of England. After translation, the letters were published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. For details on the life and discoveries of van Leeuwenhoek, we recommend his inspiring biography written by Clifford Dobell (1932).
One cannot explain words without making incursions into the sciences themselves, as is evident from dictionaries; and, conversely, one cannot present a science without at the same time defining its terms
—Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
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Rosenberg, E., Zilber-Rosenberg, I. (2013). Introduction: Symbioses and the Hologenome Concept. In: The Hologenome Concept: Human, Animal and Plant Microbiota. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04241-1_1
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