In the mid-nineteenth century, William Arthur, the editor of The Antiquarian and General Review (and, coincidentally, it turns out, the father of Chester Arthur, who later became President of the United States), published the following “Curious Discovery”:

Professor Bronson, in a late lecture, stated that if a drop of human blood, be examined by a Microscope, and magnified some twenty millions of times, all the species of animalcula now existing on the earth, or that have existed since the creation, will then be discovered. That in the blood of a person in health, these animalcula are quiet, but furious and preying upon each other, when the individual is laboring under disease. He also asserted that a drop of water, taken from a stagnant pool in which a dead cat had been decomposed, when subjected to the microscope, will shew every species of the cat-kind that ever existed, raging and destroying each other. This learned Professor is of opinion that “man contains within himself all the principles of the universe.”—Ed.

“Professor” Bronson appears to be “Charles Cotesworth Pinckney Bronson,” who was “a noted lecturer on elocution, philosophy, etc.,” and not a scientist, who published a book entitled, Elocution; or, Mental and Vocal Philosophy in 1845.

A microscope could not then, and cannot now, magnify a drop of blood twenty million times. However, Bronson, who was not actually a professor, was, like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Amos Bronson Alcott, an adherent of transcendentalism, which held that nature was a mirror of the human soul. He would travel around with an oxyhydrogen projection microscope, which could cast enormous magnified images onto a wall, and said pretty much whatever he wanted about the floating blobs. The concept of “animalcula” was first proposed by Dutch biologist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek in the 1600s, and the word has always sounded smart. At any rate, professor Bronson got a lot of good press, as you can see.

Professor Bronson, incidentally, was an acquaintance of Edgar Allan Poe, whose poem. While on a lion hunting trip to New York (which makes no sense, but that’s how history has recorded it), Bronson commissioned Poe to write “Ulalume”, as an illustration, perhaps, of the “man/microcosm” theory, as well as a piece “suitable for recitation embodying thoughts that would admit of vocal variety and expression” for Bronson’s elocution classes. As the good professor should have foreseen, the poem freaked him out, and he never used it.

The whole theory was a lot of baloney, but it dazzled people back then and sparked their imaginations, and a hundred years later, it inspired a few Looney Tunes cartoons. So, overall, a net positive.