Robert Hooke was an English microscopist who is generally credited for the discovery of cell. At the age of 27 he was awarded the position of curator of the Royal Society, England's foremost scientific academy. One of the many questions Hooke appempted to answer was why stoppers made of cork were so well suited to holding air in a bottle. As he wrote in 1665 "I took a good clear piece of cork, and with a Penknife sharpen'd as keen as a razor, I cut a peice of it off, and.... then examining it with a microscope me thought I could perceive it to appear a little porous... much like a Honeycomb". Hooke called the pores cells because they reminded him of the cells inhabited by monks living in a monestry. In actual Hooke had observed the empty cell walls of dead plant tissue,