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Scientist than it had been when Leeuwenhoek began his first grinding of lenses. The Grand Inquisition was beginning to pull in its horns. It preferred jerking out the tongues of obscure alleged criminals and burning the bodies of unknown heretics, to persecuting Servetuses and Galileos. The Invisible College no longer met in cellars or darkened rooms, and learned societies all over were now given the generous support of parliaments and kings. It was not only beginning to be permitted to question superstitions, it was becoming fashionable to do it. The thrill and dignity of real research into nature began to elbow its way into secluded studies of philosophers. Voltaire retired for years into the wilds of rural France to master the great discoveries of Newton, and then to popularize them in his country. Science even penetrated into brilliant and witty and immoral drawing-rooms, and society leaders like Madame de Pompadour bent their heads over the forbidden Encyclopedia—to try to understand the art and science of the making of rouge and silk stockings.

Along with this excited interest in everything from the mechanics of the stars to the caperings of little animals, the people of Spallanzani's glittering century began to show an open contempt for religion and dogmas, even the most sacred ones. A hundred years before men had risked their skins to laugh at the preposterous and impossible animals that Aristotle had gravely put into his books on biology. But now, they could openly snicker at the mention of his name and whisper: "Because he's Aristotle it implies that he must be believed e'en though he lies." Still there was plenty of ignorance in the world, and much pseudo-science—even in the Royal Societies and Academies. And Spallanzani, freed from the horror of an endless future of legal wranglings, threw himself with vigor into getting all kinds of knowledge, into testing all kinds" of theories, into disrespecting all kinds of authorities no matter how famous, into association with every kind of person, from fat bishops, officials, and professors to outlandish actors and minstrels.