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beasts, and how to use a microscope. He cut his hands and broke large expensive flasks. He forgot to clean his lenses and sometimes saw his little animals dimly through his fogged glasses—just as you can faintly make out minnows in the water tiled up by your net. He raved at his blunders; he was not the dogged worker that Leeuwenhoek had been—but. despite his impetuousness he was persistent—he must prove that these yarns about the animalcules were yarns, nothing more. But wait! "If I set out to prove something I am no real scientist—I have to learn to follow where the facts lead me—I have to learn to whip my prejudices. . . ." And he kept on learning to study little animals, and to observe with a patient, if not an unprejudiced eye, and gradually he taught the vanity of his ideas to bow to the hard clearness of his facts.

At this time another priest, named Needham, a devout Catholic who liked to think he could do experiments, was becoming notorious in England and Ireland, claiming that little microscopic animals were generated marvelously in mutton gravy. Needham sent his experiments to the Royal Society, and the learned Fellows deigned to be impressed.

He told them how he had taken a quantity of mutton gravy hot from the fire, and put the gravy in a bottle, and plugged the bottle up tight with a cork, so that no little animals or their eggs could possibly get into the gravy from the air. Next he even went so far as to heat the bottle and its mutton gravy in hot ashes. "Surely," said the good Needham, "this will kill any little animals or their eggs, that might remain in the flask." He put this gravy flask away for a few days, then pulled the cork—and marvel of marvels—when he examined the stuff inside with his lens, he found it swarming with animalcules.

"A momentous discovery, this," cried Needham to the Royal Society, "these little animals can only have come from the juice of the gravy. Here is a real experiment showing that life can come spontaneously from dead stuff!" He told them mutton-gravy wasn't necessary—a soup made from seeds or almonds would do the same trick.