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Antony van Leeuwenhoek is the discoverer of bacteria and other microorganisms. However, his name is currently not as well-known as those of Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch or Shibasaburo Kitasato. Why not? To answer this question I read a book published in 1932 by Clifford Dobell, an English protozoologist, and found some answers. First, Leeuwenhoek was not a professional scientist in any university or scientific institute, but merely an average citizen in Delft, Holland, working as a merchant in his own shop, and later he also served as an office-holder in Delft city hall. Second, he made and invented his own microscopes but never made his work on microscopes and observation techniques widely known to the public. Accordingly, after his death, his excellent techniques for observing microorganisms were not handed down to the next generation and eventually became forgotten by the scientific community. Although he did not write any scientific paper, he did write about his observations in many letters addressed to the Royal Society of London. Dr. Dobell had translated most of them into English and included them in his book. I picked up and translated several of these letters into Japanese and have included them in this review to show how he described his observations and also what he thought about the presence of such small animals invisible to the naked eye. By reading this review I hope you will come to understand the efforts and abilities of a citizen in Delft about 340 years ago.

Isaac Beeckman (1588-1637) is a self-learning man. He learned medicine by his reading medical books (contemporary and classic). In this paper I study how Beeckman read and understood them. He did not merely memorize them. But he gave some supplementary explanations to their (he thought) insufficient passages, sometimes criticized them and gave mechanical explanation that was based on atomism with hydrostatics. We can find similar ways of reading in the works of Lucretius and Cardano which young Beeckman read repeatedly. Beeckman learned the way of explaining natural phenomena with atomism from Lucretius' De rerum natura, and the way of explaining mechanics with natural philosophy and of demonstrating the principles of natural philosophy with machines from Cardano's De subtilitate. Beeckman's interactive reading is a good style of self-learning, but to avoid some bad effects of self-learning, he had to talk actually to a good respondent such as young Descartes.

Koan Ogata (1810-1863), a medical doctor in Osaka, is renowned for his contribution to the spread of vaccination and for his private school Teki-juku, a Rangaku school where education of Western learning was done by means of the Dutch language. In many letters collected in "Ogata Koan no Tegami" (1980-1996), he asked help for obtaining various Dutch scientific books to his former students, Shuhei Mitsukuri and Ryotei Takeya during several years around 1859: Mitsukuri was a staff member of the Foreign Affairs and intermittently Bansho Shirabesho (Institute for Western Learning) of the Tokugawa Shogunate in Edo, while Takeya was a medical doctor of the Fukuoka Clan. Moreover, Ogata wrote to Mitsukuri in 1858 that he had asked Yukichi Fukuzawa in Edo to buy a Dutch wordbook for him. On the other hand, Genki Kusaka, a student at the Teki-juku, noted in a letter to his parents in 1854 that Ogata had bought Dutch books from Tsuji, official Dutch interpreter of Nagasaki, when the Tsuji stopped by in Osaka on the way to Edo in the February of the year. This paper outlines the above letters to show how Koan Ogata tried to obtain Dutch books from Edo and Nagasaki; their titles and areas are discussed in view of the history of Western learning, and identification is made on the two books that have been left unclarified.