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used to study his little animals. He dipped the tube into a soup that swarmed with his microbes; the fluid rushed up into the hair-fine pipe. Then Spallanzani sealed off one end of it, and ingeniously tied the other end to a powerful vacuum pump, and set the pump going, and stuck his lens against the thin wall of the tube. He expected to see the wee animals stop waving the "little arms which they were furnished to swim with;" he expected them to get giddy and then stop moving. . . .

The pump chugged on—and nothing whatever happened to the microbes. They went nonchalantly about their business and did not seem to realize there was such a thing as life-maintaining air! They lived for days, for weeks—and Spallanzani did the experiment again and again, trying to find something wrong with it. This was impossible—nothing can live without air—how the devil do these beasts breathe? He wrote his amazement in a letter to his friend Bonnet:

"The nature of some of these animalcules is astonishing! They are able to exercise in a vacuum the functions they use in free air. They make all of their courses, they go up and down in the liquid, they even multiply for several days in this vacuum. How wonderful this is! For we have always believed there is no living being that can live without the advantages air offers it."

Spallanzani was very proud of his imagination and his quick brain and he was helped along in this conceit by the flattery and admiration of students and intelligent ladies and learned professors and conquering kings. But he was an experimenter too—he was really an experimenter first, and he bent his head humbly when a new fact defeated one of the brilliant guesses of his brain.

Meanwhile this man who was so rigidly honest in his experiments, who would never report anything but the truth of what he found amid the smells and poisonous vapors and shining machines of his laboratory, this superbly honest. scientist, I say. was planning low tricks to increase his pay as Professor