Here the searcher in him came forward--he didn’t go to his desk to write Needham about it--instead he went to his dusty glass-strewn laboratory, and grabbed some flasks and seeds, and dusted off his microscope. He started out to test, even to defeat, if necessary, his own explanations. Needham didn’t heat his soups long enough--maybe there are little animals, or their eggs, which can stand a tremendous heat, who knows? So Spallanzani took some large glass flasks, round bellied with tapering necks. He scrubbed and washed and dried them till they stood in gleaming rows on his table. Then he put seeds of various kinds into some, and peas and almonds into others, and following that poured pure water into all of them. “Now I won’t only heat these soups for a short time,” he cried, “but I’ll boil them for an hour!” He got his fires ready--then he grunted: “But how shall I close up my flasks? Corks might not be tight enough, they might let these infinitely wee things through.” He pondered. “I’ve got it, I’ll melt the necks of my bottles shut in a flame. I’ll close them with glass--nothing, no matter how small, can sneak through glass!” So he took his shining flasks one by one, and rolled their necks gently in a hot flame till each one was fused completely shut. He dropped some of them when they got too hot--he sizzled the skin of his fingers, he swore, and got new flasks to take the smashed ones’ places. Then when his flasks were all sealed and ready, “Now for some real heat,” he muttered, and for tedious hours he tended his bottles, as they bumped and danced in caldrons of boiling water. One set he boiled for a few minutes only. Another he kept in boiling water for a full hour. At last, his eyes near stuck shut with tiredness, he lifted the flasks of stew steaming from their kettles, and put them carefully away--to wait for nervous anxious days to see whether any little animals would grow in them. And he did another thing, a simple one which I almost forgot to tell you about, he made another duplicate set of stews in flasks plugged up with corks, not sealed, and after boiling these for an hour put them away beside the others. Then he went off for days to do the thousand things that were not enough to use up his buzzing energy. He wrote letters to the famous naturalist Bonnet, in Switzerland, telling him his experiments; he played football; he went hunting and fishing. He lectured about science, and told his students not of dry technicalities only, but of a hundred things--from the marvelous wee beasts that Leeuwenhoek had found in his mouth to the strange eunuchs and the veiled multitudinous wives of Turkish harems. At last he vanished and students and professors--and ladies--asked: “Where is the Abbé Spallanzani?” He had gone back to his rows of flasks of seed soup. III