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here he was laying about him in this fog of big words, and hitting nothing. Spallanzani stormed and laughed and was sarcastic and bitter about this marvelous hoax, this mysterious Vegetative Force. It was the Force, prattled Needham, that had made Eve grow out of Adam's rib. It was the Force, once more, that gave rise to the remarkable worm-tree of China, which is a worm in winter, and then marvelous to say is turned by the Vegetative Force into a tree in summer! And much more of such preposterous stuff, until Spallanzani saw the whole science of living things in danger of being upset, by this alleged Vegetative Force with which, next thing people knew, Needham would be turning cows into men and fleas into elephants.

Then suddenly Spallanzani had his chance, for Needham made an objection to one of his experiments. "Your experiment does not hold water," he wrote to the Italian, "because you have heated your flasks for an hour, and that fierce heat weakens and so damages the Vegetative Force that it can no longer make little animals."

This was just what the energetic Spallanzani was waiting for, and he forgot religion and large classes of eager students and the pretty ladies that loved to be shown through his museum. He rolled up his wide sleeves and plunged into work, not at a writing desk but before his laboratory bench, not with a pen, but with his flasks and seeds and microscopes.

"So Needham says heat damages the Force in the seeds, does he? Has he tried it? How can he see or feel or weigh or measure this Vegetative Force? He says it is in the seeds, well, we'll heat the seeds and see!"

Spallanzani got out his flasks once more and cleaned them. He brewed mixtures of different kinds of seeds, of peas and beans and vetches with pure water, until his work room almost ran over with flasks—they perched on high shelves, they sat