Antoni van Leeuwenhoek
                                                    	
	
	Antoni was a Dutch maker of microscopes, who made discoveries concerning 
protozoa, red blood cells, capillary systems, and the life cycles of insects.
	
	He was born in Holland in 1632 and received little or no scientific education.
While a haberdasher and a chamberlain for the sheriffs of Delft, he devised, as a hobby,
his single, tiny, double-convex lenses mounted between brass plates and held close to 
the eye. Through them he was able to peer at objects mounted on pinheads, magnifying 
them up to 300 times. In 1668 he confirmed and developed the discovery by Italian 
anatomist Marcello Malpighi of capillary systems, demonstrating how the red corpuscles 
circulated through the capillaries of a rabbit's ear and The web of a frog's foot. In 
1674 he gave the first accurate description of red blood corpuscles. He then observed 
what he called animalcule in pond water, rainwater, in human saliva, and in 1677 he 
described the spermatozoa of both insects and humans.
	
	He opposed the prevalent theory of spontaneous generation and demonstrated that 
granary weevils, fleas, and mussels are not created from wheat grains and sand but 
develop from tiny eggs. He described thelife cycle of ants, showing how the larvae and 
pupae originate from eggs.He also observed plant and muscle tissue, and described three
types of bacteria: bacilli, cocci, and spirilla. He kept the craft of making his lenses 
a secret, however, so that not until the improvement of the compound microscope in the
19th century was the next observation of bacteria made.