“What is it that causes these little animals to arise in mutton gravy, even after it has been heated, my Lord?” you can hear Needham asking of the noble count. Count Buffon’s brain whirled in a magnificent storm of the imagination, then he answered: “You have made a great, a most momentous discovery, Father Needham. You have put your finger on the very source of life. In your mutton gravy you have uncovered the very force--it must be a force, everything is force--which creates life!” “Let us then call it the Vegetative Force, my Lord,” replied Father Needham. “An apt name,” said Buffon, and he retired to his perfumed study and put on his best suit and wrote--not from dry laboratory notes or the exact records of lenses or flasks but from his brain--he wrote, I say, about the marvels of this Vegetative Force that could make little animals out of mutton gravy and heated seed soups. In a little while Vegetative Force was on everybody’s tongue. It accounted for everything. The wits made it take the place of God, and the churchmen said it was God’s most powerful weapon. It was popular like a street song or an off color story--or like present day talk about relativity. Worst of all, the Royal Society tumbled over itself to get ahead of the men in the street, and elected Needham a Fellow, and the Academy of Sciences of Paris made him an Associate. Meanwhile in Italy Spallanzani began to walk up and down his laboratory and sputter and rage. Here was a danger to science, here was ignoring of cold facts, without which science is nothing. Spallanzani was a priest of God, and God was perhaps reasonably sacred to him, he didn’t argue with any one about that--but here was a pair of fellows who ignored his pretty experiments, his clear beautiful facts! But what could Spallanzani do? Needham and Buffon had deluged the scientific world with words--they had not answered his facts, they had not shown where Spallanzani’s experiment of the sealed flasks was wrong. The Italian was a fighter, but he liked to fight with facts and experiments, and here he was laying about him in this fog of big words, and hitting nothing. Spallanzani stormed and laughed and was sarcastic and bitter about this marvelous hoax, this mysterious Vegetative Force. It was the Force, prattled Needham, that had made Eve grow out of Adam’s rib. It was the Force, once more, that gave rise to the remarkable worm-tree of China, which is a worm in winter, and then marvelous to say is turned by the Vegetative Force into a tree in summer! And much more of such preposterous stuff, until Spallanzani saw the whole science of living things in danger of being upset, by this alleged Vegetative Force with which, next thing people knew, Needham would be turning cows into men and fleas into elephants.