ZOO505 Slides 1-144 by VUBuddy

The discovery of cells

Because of their small size, cells can only be observed with the aid of a microscope.

Spectacles were first made in Europe in the thirteenth century.

The first compound (double-lens) light microscopes were constructed by the end of the sixteenth century.

By the mid-1600s, a handful of pioneering scientists had used their handmade microscopes to uncover a world that would never have been revealed to the naked eye. Robert Hooke, an English microscopist discovered the cell at age 27, and he was awarded the position of curator of the Royal Society of London.

He took a dead piece of cork and observed empty compartments in it under the microscope, and named them cell.

Anton van Leeuwenhoek examined a drop of pond water under the microscope and he observed the crawling microscopic entities which he named as “animalcules”. He was also the first to describe various forms of bacteria, which he obtained from water in which pepper had been soaked and from scrapings of his teeth.

In 1838, Matthias Schleiden, a German botanist, concluded that, plants were made of cells and that the plant embryo arose from a single cell.

In 1839, Theodor Schwann, a German zoologist and colleague of Schleiden’s, published a comprehensive report on the cellular basis of animal life.