Martin Lister

Ray called it Gerard Immaculatus, that is, freed from its stains.

The succession of influential English naturalists may be said to begin with Ray Willoughby and Martin Lister, all of whom belonged to the last half of the 17th century.

End of section 2

section three of the history of

It was easy to make lenses of high magnifying power, but hard to correct their optical defects, to bring a sufficiently strong light to bear upon the object, and to focus the lens.

When he wished to send out his preparations for examination by others, he found it best to fix the objects in the focus, and to provide each with a separate lens.

with such microscopes he managed to study and figure very minute objects such as blood corpuscles spermatozoa and bacteria the spermatozoa were brought under his notice by a young dutch physician named ham but it was lavenhoek's account of them and his daring theory of their physiological role which gave them such celebrity to lewenhoek we owe the first discovery of the rotifers the infusoria hydra the yeast cell the bacteria and the generation of aphids without male parents the tradition of the minute anatomist has never been lost though we shall be unable to pursue it in these pages lionette even surpassed swammerdam in the elaborate finish of some of his insect dissections early notions about the nature of fossils throughout the sixteenth century naturalists held animated debates about the shells which are found far from the sea even on the top of high hills had they ever formed part of living animals or not such a question could hardly have been seriously discussed among simple-minded people but the learned men of the sixteenth century were rarely simple-minded they had been trained to argue and argument could make it plausible that such shapes as these were generated by fermentation or by the influence of the stars so prevalent were these doctrines that it entitles any early philosopher to the respect of later generations that he should have taken shells bones and teeth to be evidences of animal life in this singular roll of honour we find the names of cecilpini pelisi scela stenson hook and woodward in england the struggle between philosophy and common sense was long kept up dr ralph cudworth of cambridge taught that there is in nature a subordinate creative force of limited power and wisdom to whose imperfections may be attributed the errors and bungles which now and then mar the work to this subordinate creative force he gave the name of vegetable soul or plastic nature none but cambridge men it would appear felt the weight of cudworth's reasoning but several of these and especially john rae and martin lister defended his conclusions in published treatises rae came at last to believe that fossils were the remains of actual organisms but he was still much hampered by his theological views Lister, in a chapter devoted to coclites, or shell-shaped stones, pointed out that they differ from true shells in being of larger size, in occurring far from the sea, in being formed of mere stony substance, and in being often imperfect.

Some naturalists had conjectured that the living animals of the coclites still exist at great depths in the sea, but Lister evidently thought otherwise.