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canal, wiping it out, so cutting off the chance of any other wee beast getting into the water drop to join its lonely little comrade.

“God!” he cried. “I’ve done it—no one’s ever done this before—I’ve got one animalcule all by himself; now nothing can bump him, now we’ll see if he’ll turn into two new ones!” His lens hardly quivered as he sat with tense neck and hands and arms, back bent, eye squinting through the glass at the drop with its single inhabitant. “How tiny he is,” he thought—“he is like a lone fish in the spacious abysses of the sea.”

Then a strange sight startled him, not less dramatic for its unbelievable littleness. The beast—it was shaped like a small rod—began to get thinner and thinner in the middle. At last the two parts of it were held together by the thickness of a spider web thread, and the two thick halves began to wriggle desperately—and suddenly they jerked apart. There they were, two perfectly formed, gently gliding little beasts, where there had been one before. They were a little shorter but otherwise they couldn’t be told from their parent. Then, what was more marvelous to see, these two children of the first one in a score of minutes split up again—and now there were four where there had been one!

Spallanzani did this ingenious trick a dozen times and got the same result and saw the same thing; and then he descended on the unlucky Ellis like a ton of brick and flattened into permanent obscurity Ellis and his fine yarn about the children and the grandchildren inside the little animals. Spallanzani was sniffish, he condescended, he advised, he told Ellis to go back to school and learn his a b c’s of microbe hunting. He hinted that Ellis wouldn’t have made his mistake if he’d read the fine paper of de Saussure carefully, instead of inventing preposterous theories that only cluttered up the hard job of getting genuine new facts from a stingy Nature.

A scientist, a really original investigator of nature, is like a writer or a painter or a musician. He is part artist, part cool searcher. Spallanzani told himself stories, he conceived him-