Name ______________________________ Class ___________________ Date __________________CELL STRUCTURE AND FUNCTIONThe History of Cell BiologyRead the passage below, which covers topics from your textbook. Answer thequestions that follow.The discovery of cells was made possible by the development of themicroscope in the 17th century. In 1665, the English scientist Robert Hookeused a microscope to examine a thin slice of cork. Hooke described it asconsisting of “a great many little boxes.” These “little boxes” reminded him ofthe cubicles or “cells” in which monks lived, so he called them cells.What Hooke had observed were actually the remains of dead plant cells.The first person to observe living cells was a Dutch trader, Anton vanLeeuwenhoek. Although van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope was rather simple,in 1673 it was powerful enough to enable him to view the world ofmicroscopic organisms which had never before been seen.About 150 years passed before scientists began to organize the observationsbegun by Hooke and van Leeuwenhoek into a unified theory known as the celltheory. This theory has three parts:(1)All living things are composed of one or more cells.
