Environmental Engineering Reference
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FIGURE 9.2
A 1756 illustration by Henry Baker of van Leeuwenhoek's microscopes.
Limnology has a long and rich history. In the 1600s and early 1700s, lakes in Germany and the
Netherlands were categorized based on the presence or absence of stream inlows. Also, in the late
1600s, van Leeuwenhoek developed the irst compound microscope and noticed organisms in the
water (Figure 9.2). In the 1700s, Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, a Swiss aristocrat, physicist, and
Alpine traveler, developed a modiied thermometer and determined that the deep waters in some
Swiss lakes were much colder than their surface waters all year round.
In the 1800s, further steps in the advancement of limnology were the introduction of the plank-
ton townet by Johannes Muller in 1846 and the Secchi disk to measure water transparency by Pietro
Angelo Secchi in 1865. Francois-Alphonse Forel, while at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland,
published a monograph on studies of Lac Leman and then published the irst limnology text,
FIGURE 9.3 Handbuch der Seenkunde: allgemeine Limnologie (Handbook of Limnology) published in
1901; the irst limnology-focused text book.
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