

This is what German pastor Johann August Ephraim Goeze dubbed a “tiny water-bear” when he first spotted it among the animacules in the droplets of stagnant water under his microscope. A few years later, an Italian research dubbed the slow-moving critters “tardigrades.” But this is the first image ever made of one.
I found it on Public Domain Review, where they discussed Goeze’s sense of wonder at discovering the unseen creation in the world that’s too small to see:
Goeze’s observations and drawings covered just a few pages, appended to his German translation of Charles Bonnet’s Traite d’insectologie, but they communicated the same wonder and fascination for tardigrades that many still feel today.
Goeze was a theologian and philosopher by training, born in the town of Aschersleben in the Anhalt state of what is now Germany. As a pastor, he only began looking at the minuscule world at the age of forty-one, after attending an enthralling microscope demonstration. Goeze immediately purchased several books on the subject and acquired his very own compound microscope in order to study microfauna himself.
Goeze also compared the little creatures – which today’s internet finds utterly adorable in their durability – to fearsome predators: “just as certain as the tigers and lions of the African deserts.” But safer for us to observe up here in the big world.