Letter 0647

Chamberlayne returns Leeuwenhoek’s letter with apologies for the delay. He was held up by business and sheer fascination with it. Chamberlayne found it to be one of ‘the most intricate’ letters he has ever read, but rife with grammatical problems which he has corrected. He describes the letter as being full of trivial sentences that artificially double its length, which he attributes to Leeuwenhoek being a man of mechanical genius rather than letters. Chamberlayne asks Sloane to have Dr Miller translate the letter. He wants to be paid in copies of the Philosophical Transactions for his translation work. John Chamberlayne was a translator and editor specializing in modern languages which he studied at the University of Leiden. He translated works on many topics, was a fellow of the Royal Society, and published three works in the Philsophical Transactions (Reavley Gair, Chamberlayne, John (1668/91723), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Oct 2009 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/5060, accessed 30 May 2011]).