Rock Doc: Just a tiny grain of sand can act as big evidence

Born in 1632 in the Netherlands, Antony van Leeuwenhoek was a self-taught man who made microscopes, ultimately producing some 500 of them. Van Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes could magnify objects up to 200 times. That opened up a range of investigations to him, and he took advantage of the new devices he was creating to look at almost anything and everything, including bacteria he obtained from between his teeth.

Van Leeuwenhoek also took a deep interest in a common substance: sand. He collected it and studied it. That may have been because he was using sand to grind the lenses of his microscopes. In any event, using his creative mind and good observations, he studied sand intensely. He determined that sand grains are a bit like snowflakes, with individuality built into each particle.

I was reading recently about van Leeuwenhoek in a book by Michael Welland called “Sand: The Never-Ending Story.” It’s a good read and I recommend it if you take an interest in the natural world. Even a simple substance like sand can be fascinating from a variety of viewpoints once you learn something about it.

Just as one example, sand can be of forensic interest. Sand found in the tires of a car or the boots of a person can place a suspect at the scene of the crime just as effectively as an eyewitness. Sherlock Holmes was, of course, a fictional character, but his methods of observing sand and mud on shoes have the strength of forensic science behind them.

An early case concerning the evidence of sand and soil came about in 1908 in Bavaria. The police suspected a man, who happened to be a poacher, of murdering a woman. Quite luckily for the police, the poacher’s wife had cleaned his shoes the day before the murder. Police found three layers of earth material on them during their investigation. The first layer, the one nearest the sole of the shoe, corresponded to the earth outside the poacher’s house. No surprises there: He had worn his freshly cleaned shoes when he left his house, and picked up materials on his shoes as soon as he stepped outside.

The next layer of material on the shoes was laced with a distinctive red sand of the sort found where the body of the dead woman had been discovered. The final and outermost layer included cement, brick fragments and coal dust corresponding to materials on the ground where the poacher’s gun had been found.

Tellingly, none of the layers of material on the suspect’s shoe matched the soil from the fields where the poacher claimed he had been at the time of the murder. In short, the simple evidence of detritus on his shoes condemned the suspect, bolstering the prosecution’s case just as much a witness might have.

You really can see the world in a grain of sand.