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that Spallanzani had spiked once for all that nonsense about animals—even the tiniest ones—arising spontaneously. Led by Voltaire they cracked vast jokes about the Vegetative Force and its parents, the pompous Buffon and his laboratory boy, Father Needham.

"But there is a Vegetative Force," cried Needham, "a mysterious something—I'll admit you can't see it or weigh it—that can make life arise out of gravy or soup or out of nothing at all, perhaps. Maybe it can stand all of that roasting that Spallanzani applies to it, but what it needs particularly is a very elastic air to help it. And when Spallanzani boils his flasks for an hour, he hurts the elasticity of the air inside the flasks!"

Spallanzani was up in arms in a moment, and bawled for Needham's experiments. "Has he heated air to see if it got less elastic?" The Italian waited for experiments—and got only words. "Then I'll have to test it out myself," he said, and once again he put seeds in rows of flasks and sealed off their necks in a flame—and boiled them for an hour. Then one morning he went to his laboratory, and cracked off the neck of one of his bottles. . . .

He cocked his ear—he heard a little wh-i-s-s-s-s-t. "What's this," he muttered, and grabbed another bottle and cracked off its neck, holding his ear close by. Wh-i-s-s-st! There it was again. "That means the air is coming out of my bottle; or going into it," he cried, and he lighted a candle and ingeniously held it near the neck of a third flask as he cracked the seal.

The flame sucked inward toward the opening.

"The air's going in—that means the air in the bottle is less elastic than the air outside, that means maybe Needham is right!"

For a moment Spallanzani had a queer feeling at the pit of his stomach, his forehead was wet with nervous sweat, his world tottered around him. . . . Could that fool Needham have made a lucky stab, a clever guess about what heat did to