The Microscope in the Dutch Republic: The Shaping of Discovery (review)

This is an interesting and admirable attempt to reconstruct the social and intellectual context of discovery, in this case, discovery with the microscope in the seventeenth-century Dutch republic. In his 1973 study of physics at the University of Leiden, Edward Ruestow provided English-speaking readers with one of the few monographic studies of the new science in the early modern Netherlands. The Microscope in the Dutch Republic takes up some of the same themes but now as part of a study of the dynamics of discovery.

The microscope opened up an unimagined new world, and numerous seventeenth-century virtuosos left accounts that convey the wonder with which they gazed upon (or, given the tiny microscopes of that time, squinted at) it. Jan Swammerdam wrote of his microscopic investigations in the passionate terms of a revelation but feared at the same time that his curiosity might be sweeping him away from God. In his study of the eye of the bee, he speaks of “the greatest joy in the world” (p. 129). Antoni van Leeuwenhoek vividly described his microscopic observations, especially capillary circulation, commenting on its likeness to wind-driven snow (p. 176). To Ruestow’s credit, he captures in his prose and well-chosen quotations this sense of exhilaration. Given the fascination that this microscopic world exercised over its observers, why then, asks Ruestow, was microscopic research not more systematic? Why was discovery not speedier and more continuous in the Netherlands before the nineteenth century? To answer these questions, he surveys the course of microscopy from its first appearance in the 1610s to the peak period of discovery six decades later, to its use in the debates on spontaneous generation and embryonic preformation in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and, briefly, to its integration into the research programs of nineteenth-century German universities.

Like the European encounter with the New World of the Americas, the microscope penetrated the consciousness of Europeans only very slowly. To explain this, Ruestow focuses on several factors in the Netherlands that would initially seem conducive to research with the microscope because they all “implicitly or explicitly stressed the importance of the small in nature and . . . emphasized acute observation and cultivated an intense expectation of discovery” (p. 39). These are Cartesianism, the contemporaneous medical discoveries of the body’s vessels and glands, the distinctive miniaturist painting tradition of the Netherlands that emphasized the realistic portrayal of the smallest beings in nature, and the teachings of Calvin, who wrote that God could be adored through His creation, or nature. However, he shows how the same trends could just as well have hindered as helped microscopic research: Cartesians did not in the end truly believe in the power of the senses. Moreover, the technique of injecting colored fluids into the body’s otherwise invisible vessels overshadowed work with the microscope in university medical faculties. Naturalist painters were more interested in illusionism than realism. Finally, Calvinism actually engendered a sense that if something could not be seen with the naked eye, God did not intend it for revelation. Ruestow believes that these obstacles explain why microscopy languished in the Netherlands between the 1620s and the 1670s, while it was taken up by other virtuosos during this period in England, Italy, France, and the German territories.

While such an interpretation represents an interesting twist and perhaps a corrective to those scholars who too facilely connect all the novelties of Dutch culture and the new science, it seems overwrought for two reasons. First, all these seeming obstacles evince an intense concern with the nature of material reality that appears to have been more tangibly present in the Netherlands than elsewhere. Thus the microscopist and the artistic illusionist could in fact share the same compulsion, that is, the investigation of material reality, something Ruestow sees as impossible (p. 75). Second, at what precise speed should discovery take place? How...