The adventures of Letters 38, 42, and 43

Beginning in the mid-1680's, Leeuwenhoek repeatedly published three letters.

• Letter 38 of  July 16, 1683 (AB/CL 72) to Christopher Wren, with 5 figures. Frogs, semen, muscle fibers, digestion, and circulation of blood.

• Letter 42 of July 25, 1684 (AB/CL 81) to the members of the Royal Society, with 6 figures. Brains, gout, leprosy, and the scales of eels.

• Letter 43 of January 5, 1685 (AB/CL 82) to the members of the Royal Society, with 11 figures.

He sent all three to the Royal Society. The manuscripts are still available there but the original drawings have been lost. All three were published in Philosophical Transactions.

Letter 38 was published in Volume 13, number 152, in October, 1683, shortly after Leeuwenhoek sent it. As usual, the editors published an excerpt, titled, "An Abstract of a Letter ...", in this case about three-quarters of the long letter, omitting much of the latter part where Leeuwenhoek, characteristically, discusses observations that don't seem to be related to the earlier ones. Letter 42 was similarly excerpted in Volume 15, number 168, on February 23, 1685 and Letter 43 was excerpted in Volume 15, number 170, on April 20, 1685.

Letter 42 had six figures according to Alle de Brieven / Collected Letters. In the printed versions, the first figures to appear were on an numbered plate. It was followed several pages later by Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 on the same plate. This plate was inserted into the text in the first two settings; it was a separate plate in the 1708 setting.

Persumably Leeuwenhoek kept a copy of the letters. He probably had copper plates made before he sent off the drawings. The previous year, Daniel van Gaesbeeck had published Letters 32, 33, 37, and 39-41, but for reasons we don't know, those six were the only letters Gaesbeeck published. Then Leeuwenhoek began a twenty-year relationship with Cornelius Boutesteyn. Whether Leeuwenhoek brought this new batch of three letters to Boutesteyn's shop on the Rapenburg in Leiden or Boutesteyn sought them out, we do not know. Was Leeuwenhoek dissatisfied with the excerpting in London? He may not have been able to read English, but he could easily compare his manuscript to the pages of Philosophical Transactions and see that the latter was shorter. Was he dissatisfied with the figures, which lacked the detail in Leeuwenhoek's copper plates and were numbered differently? Did Boutesteyn see an opportunity to profit from Leeuwenhoek's fame? In any event, Boutesteyn published the complete manuscripts.

In 1685, Boutesteyn published all of Letters 38, 42 and 43 in that order in Dutch under the title Ontledingen en Ontdekkingen van de onsigtbare Verborgentheden. The volume had 88 pages with continuous pagination beginning at page 3. It was mispaginated 79-94 after page 72 to the end. In Alle de Brieven / Collected Letters, the editors called this version A.

In the same year, 1685, Boutesteyn published the same three letters, in Latin tranlsation but with the same engraved plates. For whatever reason, he put the letters in reverse order 43, 42, and 38 under the title Anatomia et Contemplatio Nonnullorum Naturae invisibilium Secretorum Comprehensorum Epistolis.

Two years later in 1687, Boutesteyn published the same three letters in the same typesetting as the first part of a larger collection under the title (with two misspellings) Anatomia Seu interiora Rerum, Cum Animatarum tum Inanimarum [sic], Ope & nebeficio [sic] exquisitissimorum Microscopiorum Detecta .... It also had the letters 28-31, 34-36, 46, 47, 44, 45, 48-52 in that order. This second part was separately and continuously paginated but did not have a separate title page. Both parts had mispaginations. (The letters missing from the sequence were the six published by van Gaesbeeck in 1684 in Dutch but not in Latin.)

As so often with Leeuwenhoek, there is a curious exception. In 1687, Boutesteyn printed a volume, second from the left below, that has characteristics of three other publications:

• Dobell's 21, 1685 (far left below), its contents -- Letters 43, 42, amd 38 in that order -- and its running page headings: Anatomia & Contemplatio

• Dobell's 22, 1687, its front matter: Artemis print with Leeuwenhoek's name at the bottom and a blank pedestal and a 5-page dedication Jacobo (King James II)

• Dobell's 23, 1687, its title, with all the words spelled correctly: Anatomia Seu interiora Rerum, Cum Animatarum tum Inanimatarum, Ope & beneficio exquisitissimorum Microscopiorum Detecta. The image (second from right) below shows the title page with misspellings from 1687 and the re-titled page (far right), with the same letters, from 1696. It is listed in neither Dobell's nor Schierbeek's bibliographies.

The title page marked 1687 was scanned by the Beyerische StaatsBibliothek. This is the first part of Dobell #23, of which he writes:

In the copy in my possession—the only one which I have collated—the first part (Letters 43, 42, 38) is paged 3-78, and is a reprint of these pages in No. 21 (not 22).

Still in 1687, Boutesteyn also published a version of Anatomia Seu interiora Rerum that corrected both misspellings on the title page. This version came out with only Letters 43, 42, and 38, still in that order, but with several mispagations. It had the dedication to King James that was in Anatomia Seu interiora Rerum but the running page heads of the earlier Anatomia et Contemplatio. Yet another bundle in the same year had these three letters preceding the 16 letters 28-31, 34-36, 46, 47, 44, 45, 48-52 (appearing in that order).

In 1689, Boutesteyn bundled these letters with the next eight in the sequence, numbers 53 through 60, continuously paginated, under the title Continuatio Epistolarum, Datarum Ad longe Celeberrimam Regiam Societatem Londinensem ... However, this part was bundled between the two parts of the 1687 misspelled Anatomia, not at the end where Letters 53-60 would go chronologically. So this bundle has three separately paginated parts, only the first two with title pages. There must have been a lot of copies of the misspelled version lying around because the binder used them in 1689 instead of the correctly spelled versions.

In 1691, Boutesteyn re-printed Ontledingen en Ontdekkingen van de onsigtbare Verborgenthede. Comparing the 1685 and 1691 versions, Schierbeek concluded that they are the same typesetting with a different title page. A close comparison of the text (images below; click to enlarge) shows that the typesetting was the same but still altered slightly. For example, on line 3, has a hyphen added, and on line 5, the fout becomes zout to match the spelling on line 7. Boutesteyn must have saved the galleys and reinserted the plates with the figures, which he used for both the Dutch and Latin versions. Again, close comparison shows a slight re-positioning of the plate, which would have occurred when he took it out of the 1685 Dutch version to use in the 1687 and 1689 Latin versions and then re-inserted in the next Dutch version in 1691.

Onsigtbare verborgentheden, 1685 Letter 43, page 83	Onsigtbare verborgentheden, 1691 Letter 43, page 77 (corrected pagination)

In 1696, Boutesteyn published this set of letters in Latin again, this time including the eight letters in the Continuatio Epistolarium in their correct chronological order, that is, Letters 53-60 came after Letter 52. This time, it had a new title, Arcana Naturae Ope & beneficio exquisitissimorum Microscopiorum Detecta (Nature's Mysteries Detected with the aid and benefit of a cunning microscope). Note: not to be confused with Arcana Naturae Detecta in 1695 or its Continuatio Arcanorum Naturae detectorum in 1697. The title page at the beginning of the Continuatio Epistolarium remained the same, with a date of 1689.

In 1698, Boutesteyn was back with what Leeuwenhoek calls the 3rd edition of Ontledingen en Ontdekkingen van de onsigtbare Verborgenthede. Dobell noted that it had the same title and publisher, but with the letters numbered. It had several minor changes, substantive enough that they must have been changed by Leeuwenhoek. The editors of Alle de Brieven / Collected Letters call this version B.

In 1698, Boutesteyn published another edition of Arcana Naturae Ope & beneficio exquisitissimorum Microscopiorum Detecta without the eight letters in the Continuatio. The STCN notes that this is the version that was bundled with some of Langerak's re-prints to make up Volume I of the Opera Omnia in 1722.

In 1708, Boutesteyn published Arcana Naturae Ope & beneficio exquisitissimorum Microscopiorum Detecta for the final time. He died in 1713.

Finally in 1722, Johan Arnold Langerak published these letters as the first part of Opera Omnia, still in reverse chronology and with enough changes that the editors of Alle de Brieven / Collected Letters call this version C.

Note: The six early letters that Gaesbeeck published were not published in Latin until Arcana Naturae Detecta in 1695 and then as the second part of Opera Omnia in 1722. They were reprinted in Dutch by Boutesteyn in 1696. After then, those editions were included in the collected Werken.