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self the hero of a new epic exploration, he compared himself —in his writings even—to Columbus and Vespucci. He told of that mysterious world of microbes as a new universe, and thought of himself as a daring explorer making first groping expeditions along its boundaries only. He said nothing about the possible deadliness of the little animals—he didn’t like to engage, in print, in wild speculations—but his genius whispered to him that the fantastic creatures of this new world were of some sure but yet unknown importance to their big brothers, the human species. . . .

Early in the year 1799, as Napoleon started thoroughly smashing an old world to pieces, and just as Beethoven was knocking at the door of the nineteenth century with the first of his mighty symphonies, war-cries of that defiant spirit of which Spallanzani was one of the chief originators—in the year 1799, I say, the great microbe hunter was struck with apoplexy. Three days later he was poking his energetic and irrepressible head above the bedclothes, reciting Tasso and Homer to the amusement and delight of those friends who had come to watch him die. But though he refused to admit it, this, as one of his biographers says, was his Canto di Cigno, his swan song, for in a few days he was dead.

Great Egyptian kings kept their names alive for posterity by having the court undertaker embalm them into expensive and gorgeous mummies. The Greeks and Romans had their likenesses wrought into dignified statues. Paintings exist of a hundred other distinguished men. What is left for us to see of the marvelous Spallanzani?

In Pavia there is a modest little bust of him and in the museum near by, if you are interested, you may see—his bladder. What better epitaph could there be for Spallanzani? What relic could more perfectly suggest the whole of his passion to find truth, that passion which stopped at nothing, which