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Turkish harems. At last he vanished and students and professors—and ladies—asked: "Where is the Abbé Spallanzani?" He had gone back to his rows of flasks of seed soup.

He went to the row of sealed flasks first, and one by one he cracked open their necks, and fished down with a slender hollow tube to get some of the soup inside them, in order to see whether any little animals at all had grown in these bottles that he had heated so long, and closed so perfectly against the microscopic creatures that might be floating in the dust of the outside air. He was not the lively sparkling Spallanzani now. He was slow, he was calm. Like some automaton, some slightly animated wooden man he put one drop of seed-soup after another before his lens.

He first looked at drop after drop of the soup from the sealed flasks which had been boiled for an hour, and his long looking was rewarded by—nothing. Eagerly he turned to the bottles that had been boiled for only a few minutes, and cracked their seals as before, and put drops of the soup inside them before his lens.

"What's this?" he cried. Here and there in the gray field of his lens he made out an animalcule playing and sporting about—these weren't large microbes, like some he had seen— but they were living little animals just the same.

"Why, they look like little fishes, tiny as ants," he muttered —and then something dawned on him—— "These flasks were sealed—nothing could get into them from the outside, yet here are little beings that have stood a heat of boiling water for several minutes!"

He went with nervous hands to the long row of flasks he had only stoppered with corks—as his enemy Needham had done—and he pulled out the corks, one by one, and fished in the bottles once more with his tubes. He growled excitedly, he got up from his chair. he seized a battered notebook and