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He was the very opposite of Leeuwenhoek, who so patiently had ground lenses, and looked at everything for twenty years before the learned world knew anything about him. At twenty-five Spallanzani made translations of the ancient poets, and criticized the standard and much admired Italian translation of Homer. He brilliantly studied mathematics with his cousin, Laura Bassi, the famous woman professor of Reggio. He now skipped stones over the water in earnest, and wrote a scientific paper on the mechanics of skipping stones. He became a priest of the Catholic Church, and helped support himself by saying masses.

Despising secretly all authority, he got himself snugly into the good graces of powerful authorities, so that he might work undisturbed. Ordained a priest, supposed to be a blind follower of the faith, he fell savagely to questioning everything, to taking nothing for granted—excepting the existence of God, of some sort of supreme being. At least if he questioned this he kept it—rogue that he was—strictly to himself. Before he was thirty years old he had been made professor at the University of Reggio, talking before enthusiastic classes that listened to him with saucer-eyes. Here he started his first work on the little animals, those weird new little beings that Leeuwenhoek had discovered. He began his experiments on them as they were threatening to return to that misty unknown from which the Dutchman had dredged them up.

The little animals had got themselves involved in a strange question, in a furious fight, and had it not been for that, they might have remained curiosities for centuries, or even have been completely forgotten. This argument, over which dear friends grew to hate each other and about which professors tried to crack the skulls of priests, was briefly this: Can living things arise spontaneously, or does every living thing have to have parents? Did God create every plant and animal in the first six days, and then settle down to be Managing Director of the universe, or does He even now amuse Himself by allowing new animals to spring up in humorous ways?