A little pin

Van Leeuwenhoek never revealed much about his methods. It’s unclear, for instance, how he mounted such a broad range of preparation slides on his microscope to look at.

18th century inventories tell us that all his microscopes had a slide on the pin that came standard with the microscope. None of the surviving examples still have a slide on the pin.

And yet, this proposed pin securing method is not exactly in line with Van Leeuwenhoek’s most notable discoveries.