Ricki Lewis | Dec 9, 1990 | 10 min read
In 1663, English physicist Robert Hooke viewed cork under a microscope and observed that "these pores, or cells, were not very deep, but consisted of a great many little boxes." Although Hooke's discovery, which involved only the outer boundaries of cells, is considered the beginning of cell biology, it was nearly 200 years before two Germans, botanist Matthias Jakob Schleiden and physiologist Theodor Schwann, focused attention on the microcosm of life in the cell. Hooke, Schleiden, Schwann, a