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Jan Swammerdam

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Examples

  • It all started when Jan Swammerdam used a scalpel to peel away the outer layers of a certain insect.

    Middlesex Eugenides, Jeffery 2002

  • The observations of Hooke and other classical microscopists—Marcello Malpighi, Nehemiah Grew (1641–1712), Jan Swammerdam (1637–80), Antony van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) —revealed the complex minute structure of living matter and the existence of microorganisms.

    1657 2001

  • Among those who, subsequently, contributed to the further discrediting of spontaneous generation was the great entomologist, Jan Swammerdam (1637-80).

    SPONTANEOUS GENERATION ARAM VARTANIAN 1968

  • In 1670 Jan Swammerdam, painstaking student of the insect's life cycle, suggested that the grubs in galls were enclosed in them for the sake of nourishment and must come from insects that had inserted their semen or their eggs into the plants.

    GENETIC CONTINUITY BENTLEY GLASS 1968

  • Francesco Fontana, of Naples, and Cornelis van Drebbel, of Holland, was used by Malpighi, Jan Swammerdam (1627-80) of Amsterdam, the

    The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 2: Assizes-Browne 1840-1916 1913

  • Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), and of Jan Swammerdam (1637-80).

    History of Holland George Edmundson 1889

  • The first person to describe red blood cells was probably the young Dutch biologist Jan Swammerdam, who had used an early microscope in 1658 to study the blood of a frog. [

    Yahoo! Answers: Latest Questions 2010

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  • chained_bear commented on the word Jan Swammerdam

    "Leiden native Jan Swammerdam began as an amateur collector of coins, fossils, and insects. After receiving his medical degree in 1667, he traveled through Europe in pursuit of specimens to slake his appetite for information about bugs. In the next seven years Swammerdam published three volumes on his research, challenging Aristotle's claim that insects were too beneath one's dignity to merit the study one might bestow on fish or snakes. Swammerdam felt differently and conducted experiments to show the similarities between the development of insects and other animals. He proved that insects like caterpillars and butterflies didn't undergo a change of type but rather proceeded through different life stages from larvae to mature insects. The reproductive processes of the honeybee eluded him, but he managed to locate them in wasps, ants, dragonflies, snails, worms, and butterflies.


    "What was even more important... was Swammerdam's use of the microscope in dissections and his experiments with frogs. He demonstrated how the brain worked through the nerves to move muscles. Swammerdam also had a talent for creating ingenious techniques, as when he injected wax into blood vessels to make them visible.... Many of his methods remained standard well into the next century."

    --Joyce Appleby, Shores of Knowledge: New World Discoveries and the Scientific Imagination (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2013), p. 112

    December 28, 2016

  • chained_bear commented on the word Jan Swammerdam

    "Most microscopists, including Leeuwenhoek, preferred to examine a wide range of life-forms, but Jan Swammerdam devoted much of his life to studying a single class of animals, the insects. At the time, insects were a somewhat ill-defined zoological category, many of whose members were thought to be characterized by a predisposition to spontaneous generation; in the 1600s, the term insect encompassed not only flies, grasshoppers, and beetles but also many other creatures, including worms, slugs, frogs--and, for some scientists, crocodiles. A precise and careful microscopist, Swammerdam helped separate such myths and misconceptions from fact.

    "Swammerdam's precision is evident in his description of cochineal, which he wrote sometime before 1680. After careful examination, he compared cochineal to the larvae of bees; he also saw the vestiges of legs on their bodies. He did not, however, communicate these findings to the wider world. Haunted by depression, Swammerdam was ill at ease with most people; he was also a perfectionist. Rather than write them frequent letters about his results, he saved almost everything--including his observations about cochineal--for his magnum opus, Biblia naturae. Unfortunately, Swammerdam died of malaria before the book could be published. Subsequent lawsuits and other misadventures prevented the Biblia naturae from reaching the public for nearly sixty years, by which time many of its revelations were common knowledge among scientists."

    Amy Butler Greenfield, A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire (New York: Harper Collins, 2005), 148-149.

    October 6, 2017