Along with this excited interest in everything from the mechanics of the stars to the caperings of little animals, the people of Spallanzani’s glittering century began to show an open contempt for religion and dogmas, even the most sacred ones. A hundred years before men had risked their skins to laugh at the preposterous and impossible animals that Aristotle had gravely put into his books on biology. But now, they could openly snicker at the mention of his name and whisper: “Because he’s Aristotle it implies that he must be believed e’en though he lies.” Still there was plenty of ignorance in the world, and much pseudo-science--even in the Royal Societies and Academies. And Spallanzani, freed from the horror of an endless future of legal wranglings, threw himself with vigor into getting all kinds of knowledge, into testing all kinds of theories, into disrespecting all kinds of authorities no matter how famous, into association with every kind of person, from fat bishops, officials, and professors to outlandish actors and minstrels. He was the very opposite of Leeuwenhoek, who so patiently had ground lenses, and looked at everything for twenty years before the learned world knew anything about him. At twenty-five Spallanzani made translations of the ancient poets, and criticized the standard and much admired Italian translation of Homer. He brilliantly studied mathematics with his cousin, Laura Bassi, the famous woman professor of Reggio. He now skipped stones over the water in earnest, and wrote a scientific paper on the mechanics of skipping stones. He became a priest of the Catholic Church, and helped support himself by saying masses. Despising secretly all authority, he got himself snugly into the good graces of powerful authorities, so that he might work undisturbed. Ordained a priest, supposed to be a blind follower of the faith, he fell savagely to questioning everything, to taking nothing for granted--excepting the existence of God, of some sort of supreme being. At least if he questioned this he kept it--rogue that he was--strictly to himself. Before he was thirty years old he had been made professor at the University of Reggio, talking before enthusiastic classes that listened to him with saucer-eyes. Here he started his first work on the little animals, those weird new little beings that Leeuwenhoek had discovered. He began his experiments on them as they were threatening to return to that misty unknown from which the Dutchman had dredged them up.