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stolen precious stones from the museum and given them to his friends. . . .

The judges cleared him of all guilt—though it is to-day not perfectly sure that he wasn’t a little guilty; Volta and his complotters were fired from the University, and all parties, including Spallanzani, were ordered by the Emperor to stop their deplorable brawling and shut up—this thing was getting to be a smell all over Europe—students were breaking up the classroom furniture about it, and other universities were snickering at such an unparalleled scandal. Spallanzani took a last crack at his routed enemies; he called Volta a perfect bladder full of wind and invented hideous and unprintably improper names for Scarpa and Scopoli; then he returned peacefully to his microbe hunting.

Many times in his long years of looking at the animalcules he had wondered how they multiplied. Often he had seen two of the wee beasts stuck together, and he wrote to Bonnet: “When you see two individuals of any animal kind united, you naturally think they are engaged in reproducing themselves.” But were they? He jotted his observations down in old notebooks and made crude pictures of them, but, impetuous as he was in many things, when it came to experiments or drawing conclusions—he was almost as cagy as old Leeuwenhoek had been.

Bonnet told Spallanzani’s perplexity about the way little animals multiplied to his friend, the clever but now unknown de Saussure. And this fellow turned his sharp eye through his clear lenses onto the breeding habits of animalcules. In a short while he wrote a classic paper, telling the fact that when you see two of the small beasts stuck together, they haven’t come together to breed. On the contrary—marvelous to say—these coupled beasts are nothing more nor less than an old animalcule which is dividing into two parts, into two new little animals! This, said de Saussure, was the only way the microbes ever multiplied—the joys of marriage were unknown to them!