Leeuwenhoek was better at seeing this world, in all its grandeur, than anyone else. But doing so took work that others considered to be impossibly hard. So the members of the Royal Society, despite having seen the world Leeuwenhoek discovered, failed to continue to study it in any real earnestness. After verifying Leeuwenhoek's discovery of microbes, Hooke continued to look at microscopic life through his own microscopes for about six months. But then he was done.