The first person to describe a cell was Robert Hooke, whom we last encountered squabbling with Isaac Newton over credit for the invention of the inverse square law. Hooke achieved many things in his sixty-eight years—he was both an accomplished theoretician and a dab hand at making ingenious and useful instruments—but nothing he did brought him greater admiration than his popular book Microphagia: or Some Physiological Descriptions of Miniature Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses, produced in 1665. It revealed to an enchanted public a universe of the very small that was far more diverse, crowded, and finely structured than anyone had ever come close to imagining.
最先描述细胞的是罗伯特·胡克，我们在前面提到过他。他为行星运行平方反比律的发现权和艾萨克·牛顿产生过争执。胡克活了68岁。一生中取得了许多成就——他不仅是一个颇有造诣的理论家，同时还是一位制作精密仪器的高手——但是使他赢得最大声誉的还是他完成于1665年的畅销书《显微图片：或关于使用放大镜对微小实体作生理学描述》。他向心驰神往的公众展示了一个微观世界，在这个世界中，其纷繁复杂的多样性，其熙熙攘攘的热闹程度，其巧妙绝伦的结构方式，都远远超出了此前任何人的想像。

Among the microscopic features first identified by Hooke were little chambers in plants that he called "cells" because they reminded him of monks' cells. Hooke calculated that a one-inch square of cork would contain 1,259,712,000 of these tiny chambers—the first appearance of such a very large number anywhere in science. Microscopes by this time had been around for a generation or so, but what set Hooke's apart were their technical supremacy. They achieved magnifications of thirty times, making them the last word in seventeenth-century optical technology.
胡克最先发现了许多微观情景，其中有植物身上的小空洞。他给这些空洞取了一个名字：“细胞”，因为它们使他联想起修道士的单人小室。胡克计算出1平方厘米软木片大约包含195255750个这样的小空洞——如此巨大的数字在科学领域还是第一次出现。显微镜的发明到这个时候已经有一代人左右的时间，但不同的是，胡克的显微镜达到了高超的水平。它们可以放大30倍，在17世纪的光学技术中鹤立鸡群。
So it came as something of a shock when just a decade later Hooke and the other members of London's Royal Society began to receive drawings and reports from an unlettered linen draper in Holland employing magnifications of up to 275 times.
因此，仅仅10年以后，当胡克和伦敦皇家学会的其他成员收到由荷兰代尔夫特一个亚麻布料商寄来的用275倍率显微镜观察所得的图像和报告时，他们不免感到有些吃惊。