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The argument between Spallanzani and Needham didn't stay in the academies among the highbrows. It leaked out through heavy doors onto the streets and crept into stylish drawingrooms. The world would have liked to believe Needham, for the people of the eighteenth century were cynical and gay; everywhere men were laughing at religion and denying any supreme power in nature, and they delighted in the notion that life could arise haphazardly. But Spallanzani's experiments were so clear and so hard to answer, even with the cleverest words. . . .

Meanwhile the good Needham had not been resting on his oars exactly; he was an expert at publicity, and to help his cause along he went to Paris and lectured about his mutton gravy, and in Paris he fell in with the famous Count Buffon. This count was rich; he was handsome; he loved to write about science; he believed he could make up hard facts in his head; he was rather too well dressed to do experiments. Besides he really knew some mathematics, and had translated Newton into French. When you consider that he could juggle most complicated figures, that he was a rich nobleman as well, you will agree that he certainly ought to know—without experimenting—whether little animals could come to life without fathers or mothers! So argued the godless wits of Paris.

Needham and Buffon got on famously. Buffon wore purple clothes and lace cuffs that he didn't like to muss up on dirty laboratory tables, with their dust and cluttered glassware and pools of soup spilled from accidentally broken flasks. So he did the thinking and writing, while Needham messed with the experiments. These two men then set about to invent a great theory of how life arises, a fine philosophy that every one could understand, that would suit devout Christians as well as witty atheists. The theory ignored Spallanzani's cold facts, but what would you have? It came from the brain of the great Buffon, and that was enough to upset any fact, no matter how hard, no matter how exactly recorded.

"What is it that causes these little animals to arise in mutton