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maybe after all Needham has guessed right, maybe there is some mysterious force in these seeds that strong heat might destroy."

Then he cleaned his flasks again, and took some seeds, but instead of merely boiling them in water, he put them in a coffee-roaster and baked them till they were soot-colored cinders. Next he poured pure distilled water over them, growling: "Now if there was a Vegetative Force in those seeds, I have surely roasted it to death."

Days later when he came back to his flasks, with their soups brewed from the burned seeds, he smiled a sarcastic smile—a smile that meant squirmings for Buffon and Needham—for as one bottle after another yielded its drops of soup to his lens, every drop from every bottle was alive with wee animals that swam up and down in the liquid and went to and fro, living their funny limited little lives as gayly as any animals in the best soup made from unburned seeds. He had tried to defeat his own theory, and so trying had licked the pious Needham and the precious Buffon. They had said that heat would kill their Force so that no little animals could arise—and here were seeds charred to carbon, furnishing excellent food for the small creatures—this so-called Force was a myth! Spallanzani proclaimed this to all of Europe, which now began to listen to him.

Then he relaxed from his hard pryings into the loves and battles and deaths of little animals by making deep studies of the digestion of food in the human stomach—and to do this he experimented cruelly on himself. This was not enough, so he had to launch into weird investigations in the hot dark attic of his house, on the strange problem of how bats can keep from bumping into things although they cannot see. In the midst of this he found time to help educate his little nephews and to take care of his brother and sister, obscure beings who did not share his genius—but they were of his blood, and he loved them.

But he soon came back to the mysterious question of how