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life arises, that question which his religion taught him to ignore, to accept with blind faith as a miracle of the Creator. He didn't work with little animals only; instead he turned his curiosity onto larger ones, and began vast researches on the mating of toads. "What is the cause of the violent and persistent way in which the male toad holds the female?" he asked himself, and his wonder at this strange event set his ingenious brain to devising experiments of an unheard-of barbarity.

He didn't do them out of any fiendish whim to hurt the father toad-but this man must know every fact that could possibly be known about how new toads arose. What will make the toad let go this grip? And that mad priest cut off a male toad's hind legs in the midst of its copulation—but the dying animal did not relax that blind grasp to which nature drove it. Spallanzani mused over his bizarre experiment.

"This persistence of the toad," he said, "is due less to his obtuseness of feeling than to the vehemence of his passion."

In his sniffing search for knowledge which let him stop at nothing, he was led by an instinct that drove him into heartless experiments on animals—but it made him do equally cruel and fantastic tests on himself. He studied the digestion of food in the stomach, he gulped down hollowed-out blocks of wood with meat inside them, then tickled his throat and made himself vomit them up again so that he could find out what had happened to the meat inside the blocks. He kept insanely at this self-torture, until, as he admitted at last, a horrid nausea made him stop the experiments.

Spallanzani held immense correspondences with half the doubters and searchers of Europe. By mail he was a great friend of that imp, Voltaire. He complained that there were few men of talent in Italy, the air was too humid and foggy—he became a leader of that impudent band of scientists and philosophers who unknowingly prepared the bloodiest of revolutions while they tried so honestly to find truth and establish happiness and justice in the world. These men believed