Jan Swammerdam

Jan Swammerdam (February 12th 1637 with Amsterdam - February 17th 1680 in Amsterdam) is a Naturaliste Dutch.

His/her father, apothecary in Amsterdam, collected all that the vessels could bring back of the India S. the son wanted to arrange them and to make a catalog of it. Locked up in its cabinet, isolated from its family which hardly includes/understands it, it is impassioned for the Insecte S. Thanks to the Microscope which it is perhaps the first to be used, it discovers the metamorphosis insects. In 1658, it describes the first a red globule. In 1680, poor, isolated, sick for a long time, it is locked up at his place, not wanting more to leave. It bequeaths its manuscripts to his only friend, the French Melchisédech Thévenot.

Antoine van Leeuwenhoek will resume his work.

The praise of Jules Michelet

“That did one know the infinite one, before 1600? Nothing the whole. Nothing the infinitely great; nothing the infinitely small. The famous page of Pascal, quoted so much on this subject, is the naive astonishment of so old humanity and so young person, who starts to realize his extraordinary ignorance, opens finally the eyes with reality and wakes up between two abysses.

Nobody is not unaware of that Galileo, having received of Holland the magnifying glass, built the telescope, directed it and saw the sky. But one knows less commonly than Swammerdam, seized with genius the outlined microscope, turned it in bottom, and the first foresaw the infinite alive one, the world of the animated atoms! They follow one another. At the time where the large Italian (1632) dies, is born this Dutchman, Galileo of the infinitely small (1637).

Nothing more curious than to observe the very contrary impressions than the two revolutions made on their authors. Galileo, in front of the infinite one of the sky, where all marvelously appears harmonic and calculated, has more joy than of still surprised; he announces the thing in Europe in the style more enjoué. Swammerdam, in front of the infinite one of the microscopic world, appears seized of terror. It moves back in front of the pit of nature in combat. It is disturbed; it seems to fear that all its ideas, its beliefs, are not shaken by it. Odd state, melancholic person, who, with his great work, shortens his days.

The eminent doctor Boerhaave, who hundred years after Swammerdam, published with a pious care his Bible of nature , known as a surprising word and which makes dream: “It had a burning imagination of impassioned sadness which carried it to the sublime one. ” Thus this Master of the Masters in the things of patience, insatiable observer of the most meticulous detail, which continued nature so far in the unperceivable one, it was a poetic heart, a man of imagination, one of these melancholic persons who want the infinite one, nothing less, and dies to have missed it. ”

One finds this reference to Swammerdam in the trade and the vocation of scientist , of max Weber: “You Point out the aphorism of Swammerdam: “I bring to you here, in the anatomy of a louse, the proof of divine providence”, and you will include/understand which was at that time the clean task of the scientific work, under the influence (indirect) of Protestantism and the puritanism: to find the way which leads to God”.

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