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other to prove that the little animals didn’t bump into each other and so knock each other apart. In a moment the one way to decide it came to him—“All I have to do,” he meditated, “is to get one little beast off by itself, away from every other one where nothing whatever can bump into it—and then just sit and watch through the microscope to see if it breaks into two.” That was the simple and the only way to do it, no doubt, but how to get one of these infernally tiny creatures away from his swarms of companions? You can separate one puppy from a litter, or even a little minnow from its myriads of brothers and sisters. But you can’t reach in with your hands and take one animalcule by the tail—curse it—it is a million times too small for that.
Then this Spallanzani, this fellow who reveled in gaudy celebrations and vast enthusiastic lecturings, this hero of the crowd, this magnifico, crawled away from all his triumphs and pleasures to do one of the cleverest and most marvelously ingenious pieces of patient work in his hectic life. He did no less a thing than to invent a sure method of getting one animalcule—a few twenty-five thousandths of an inch long—a living animalcule, off by itself.
He went to his laboratory and carefully put a drop of seed soup swarming with animalcules on a clean piece of crystal glass. Then with a clean hair-fine tube he put a drop of pure distilled water—that had not a single little animal in it—on the same glass, close to the drop that swarmed with microbes.
“Now I shall trap one,” he muttered, as he trained his lens on the drop that held the little animals. He took a fine clean needle, he stuck it carefully into the drop of microbe soup—and then made a little canal with it across to the empty water drop. Quickly he turned his lens onto the passageway between the two drops, and grunted satisfaction as he saw the wriggling cavorting little creatures begin to drift through this little canal. He grabbed for a little camel’s-hair brush—“There! there’s one of the wee ones—just one, in the water drop!” Deftly he flicked the little brush across the small