He went to the row of sealed flasks first, and one by one he cracked open their necks, and fished down with a slender hollow tube to get some of the soup inside them, in order to see whether any little animals at all had grown in these bottles that he had heated so long, and closed so perfectly against the microscopic creatures that might be floating in the dust of the outside air. He was not the lively sparkling Spallanzani now. He was slow, he was calm. Like some automaton, some slightly animated wooden man he put one drop of seed soup after another before his lens. He first looked at drop after drop of the soup from the sealed flasks which had been boiled for an hour, and his long looking was rewarded by--nothing. Eagerly he turned to the bottles that had been boiled for only a few minutes, and cracked their seals as before, and put drops of the soup inside them before his lens. “What’s this?” he cried. Here and there in the gray field of his lens he made out an animalcule playing and sporting about--these weren’t large microbes, like some he had seen--but they were living little animals just the same. “Why, they look like little fishes, tiny as ants,” he muttered--and then something dawned on him----“These flasks were sealed--nothing could get into them from the outside, yet here are little beings that have stood a heat of boiling water for several minutes!” He went with nervous hands to the long row of flasks he had only stoppered with corks--as his enemy Needham had done--and he pulled out the corks, one by one, and fished in the bottles once more with his tubes. He growled excitedly, he got up from his chair, he seized a battered notebook and feverishly wrote down obscure remarks in a kind of scrawled shorthand. But these words meant that every one of the flasks which had been only corked, not sealed, was alive with little animals! Even the corked flasks which had been boiled for an hour, “were like lakes in which swim fishes of all sizes, from whales to minnows.” “That means the little animals get into Needham’s flasks from the air!” he shouted. “And besides I have discovered a great new fact: living things exist that can stand boiling water and still live--you have to heat them to boiling almost an hour to kill them!” It was a great day for Spallanzani, and though he did not know it, a great day for the world. Spallanzani had proved that Needham’s theory of little animals arising spontaneously was wrong--just as the old master Redi had proved the idea was wrong that flies can be bred in putrid meat. But he had done more than that, for he had rescued the baby science of microbe hunting from a fantastic myth, a Mother Goose yarn that would have made all scientists of other kinds hold their noses at the very mention of microbe hunting as a sound branch of knowledge.