His was a remarkable combination of mental endowments which, at the first glance, seem opposed to one another: a love of the great, and a taste for the subtlest researches; a sublimity of aim, and that obstinacy of analysis which would subdivide the atom, and yet never cry, "Hold, enough!" But, in reality, are these qualities of so contradictory a nature? By no means. Men whose hearts are filled with the love of Nature will declare that they harmonize admirably. Nothing great and nothing little. For the lover a simple hair is worth as much as, frequently more than, a world.
He was born in a cabinet of natural history; and his birth decided his destiny. The cabinet, formed by his father, an apothecary of Amsterdam, was a pell-mell, a chaos. The child wished to arrange it, and drew up a catalogue of it. A modest ambition led him from point to point, until he became the greatest naturalist of the century.
His father was one of the zealot collectors who then became common in Holland—insatiable treasurers of diverse rarities. It was not with pictures—though Rembrandt was then in his glory—it was not with antiquities, that he filled his house. But all that the ships brought back from the two Indies of minerals, plants, fantastic and extraordinary animals, he acquired at any cost, and heaped up in piles. These marvels of the unknown world, contrasting by their splendour and tropical magnificence with the gloomy climate which received them and the pale sea of the North, aroused in the young Hollander's mind a lively curiosity and a passionate devotion to Nature.
A very good Dutch painter has drawn a charming picture of the young Grotius: a universal scholar at twelve years of age, surrounded by folios, maps, charts, and all the appliances of learning. How much I should have preferred that the same artist—or rather the all-powerful magician, Rembrandt—had revealed to us the mysterious study, that brilliant chaos of the three kingdoms, and the young Swammerdam endeavouring to grasp the grand enigma!
The crowds and prodigious movement of Amsterdam favoured his solitude. The Babylons of commerce are for the thinker profound deserts. In that dumb ocean of men of mercantile activity, on the border of sluggish canals, he lived almost like Robinson Crusoe in his island. Isolated even in the midst of his family, who could not comprehend him, he seldom emerged from his cabinet, and descended on the fewest possible occasions into the paternal shop.
His sole recreation was to go in search of insects in the little soil which Holland offers above the waters. The melancholy meads, covered with Paul Potter's herds, possess, in the moist warmth of the summer, a great variety of animal life. The traveller is much impressed when he sees the crane, the stork, and the crow, elsewhere hostile, reconciled here by the abundance of their food, which they frequently hunt in company on terms of perfect accord. Hence the landscape acquires a peculiar charm. The cattle assume an air of placid security which they do not elsewhere exhibit. The summer is short, and early assumes the gravity of autumn. Man and Nature—all appears of a pacific character, harmonized in a great moral sweetness and remarkable seriousness of mood.
Enthusiastic collector as his father was, he grieved to see the youth of Swammerdam thus employed. It had been his ambition to make of his son a renowned minister who should shine in controversy, and an eloquent preacher. But his son seemed daily to grow more dumb. The chagrined father lowered his views from glory to money. In that golden city, so feverish and so diseased, no career is more lucrative than that of a physician. But here arose another difficulty. Swammerdam threw himself heartily into his medical studies; but on condition that he created them—as yet they did not exist. Therefore, the basis on which he desired to rest them was the preliminary creation of the natural sciences. How cure the sick man unless you understood the healthy? And how understand the latter without studying side by side the inferior animals which translate and explain disease? But can one see into such delicate mysteries with the eye alone? Does not the feebleness of the sense of vision lead us astray? The serious creation of science would suppose a reform of our senses and the creation of optics.
A veritable creation! Look at the microscope. Is it a simple spy-glass? To the eyes which the instrument possessed, Swammerdam added two arms, one of which bears the glass and the other the object. He himself says, in reference to his more difficult investigations, "that he had attempted to obtain the assistance of another person, but that such assistance proved, in fact, an obstacle." It was for this reason that he organized a dumb man of copper, a discreet servant ready for every work; thanks to whom the observer disposes of supplementary hands and numerous eyes of different degrees of power. In the same manner as the birds expand or contract their visual organs, either to grasp objects in a whole or to scrutinize with searching glance the smallest detail, Swammerdam created the method of successive enlargement; the art of employing lenses of different sizes and varying curvature, which permit the observer to see en masse, and to study each separate portion, and finally to survey the whole for the purpose of properly replacing the details and reconstituting the general harmony.
Was this all? No. To observe dead bodies, time is required; but then time robs us of them. Death, which seemingly conduces to study by its immobility, is deceitful; it fixes the mask for a moment, and the object beneath melts away. Now came a new creation of Swammerdam's. He not only taught us to see and investigate, but he devised means for our permanent investigation. By preservative injections he fixed these ephemeral objects; he compelled time to halt, and forced death to endure. The Czar Peter, who, a long time afterwards, saw in the dissecting-room of one of Swammerdam's disciples the beautiful body, supple and fresh, of a little child, with its exquisite carnation tint, thought that the rose was living, and could not be prevented from embracing it.