1 Anton van Leeuwenhoek: Attend here, my assistant!
1 Assistant: What is it, Mijnheer van Leeuwenhoek?
2 Anton van Leeuwenhoek: I have made a fantastic discovery with this "micro-scope" I have invented. Each drop of water swarms with hundreds of tiny animals!
3 Anton van Leeuwenhoek: But in alcohol, there are none. Do you know what this means?
4 Assistant: We're going to see a lot more drunk vegetarians?

Expanding our pantheon of scientific greats is Anton van Leeuwenhoek. I've called him "Anton" despite him being known by several alternate versions of that first name, because that's the name I first learned and remain most familiar with.

Van Leeuwenhoek was, as every high school biology student knows (or should know!), the developer of significant advances in early microscopy and the discoverer of many microbiological organisms and structures.

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2023-09-23 Rerun commentary: Also, van Leeuwenhoek's microscope did indeed look somewhat, vaguely, similar to the sextant I've used here to represent it, at least moreso than anything like a modern microscope.

In Dutch, "Leeuwen" means "lion", and "hoek" means "corner". The Behind the Name website states that: "The first bearer of this name lived on the corner (Dutch hoek) of the Lion's Gate (Dutch Leeuwenpoort) in the city of Delft".