|
Sperm, how exciting! Well, here is a little history of sperm that we
stumbled across in our searches....
Human sperm were first discovered by a student of Antonij van Leeuwenhoek,
a master of microscopy, in 1677, in the city of Delft, Holland. The name of the
student is not know for sure. He has been written up as Ludwin Ham, Van
Hamm or Von Hamm. One day he brought in a bottle containing semen and
pointed out that small animals could be seen moving about in the ejaculate.
Van Leeuwenhoek went on to study the emissions from a wide range of sick
and healthy men, finding the odd creatures could be detected in all. In
his report to the Royal Society in London he said: "I have seen so
excessively great a quality of living animalcules that I am astonished by
it. I can say without exaggeration that in a bit of matter no longer than
a grain of sand more that fifty thousand animlacules were present, whose
shape I can compare with nought better than our river eel. The move about
with uncommon vigor."
In other words, van Leeuwenhoek saw a bunch of tiny things wiggling around, all
excited and just didn't know what to make of it.
Of course at that time, there was still a mystery as to what they actually
were. Some thought them to be parasites while other argued they were
coagulating agents.
Some information from Comedy Vault by Mark Mirth.
In the mood for some good trivia? Get it delivered to your mailbox every Monday morning... Just sign up for our Weekly Sex Trivia!
| |