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tent, he put the bottle in boiling water and watched it bumps and dance in the kettle for an hour and while he watched he recited verses and hummed gay tunes. He put the flask away for days, then one morning, sure of his result, he came to his laboratory to open it. He lighted a candle; he held it close to the flask neck; carefully he broke the seal—wh-i-s-s-s-t! But the flame blew away from the flask this time—the elasticity of the air inside the flask was greater than that outside!

All of the long boiling had not damaged the air at all—it was even more elastic than before—and elasticity was what Needham said was necessary for his wonderful Vegetative Force. The air in the flask was super-elastic, but fishing drop after drop of the soup inside, Spallanzani couldn't find a single little animal. Again and again, with the obstinacy of a Leeuwenhoek, he repeated the same experiment. He broke flasks and spilled boiling water down his shirt-front, he seared his hands, he made vast tests that had to be done over—but always he confirmed his first result.

Triumphant he shouted his last experiment to Europe, and Needham and Buffon heard it, and had to sit sullenly amid the ruins of their silly theory, there was nothing to say—Spallanzani had spiked their guns with a simple fact. Then the Italian sat down to do a little writing himself. A virtuoso in the laboratory, he was a fiend with his quill, when once he was sure his facts had destroyed Needham's pleasant myth about life arising spontaneously. Spallanzani was sure now that even the littlest beasts had to come—always—from beasts that had lived before. He was certain too, that a wee microbe always remained a microbe of the same kind that its parents had been, just as a zebra doesn't turn into a giraffe, or have musk-oxen for children, but always stays a zebra—and has zebra babies.

"In short," shouted Spallanzani, "Needham is wrong, and