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despised conventions, which laughed at hardship, which ignored bad taste and the feeble pretty fitness of things?

He knew his bladder was diseased. “Well, have it out after I’m dead,” you can hear him whisper as he lay dying. “Maybe you’ll find an astonishing new fact about diseased bladders.” That was the spirit of Spallanzani. This was the very soul of that cynical, sniffingly curious, coldly reasoning century of his—the century that discovered few practical things—but the same century that built the high clean house for Faraday and Pasteur, for Arrhenius and Emil Fischer and Ernest Rutherford to work in.