He didn’t do them out of any fiendish whim to hurt the father toad--but this man must know every fact that could possibly be known about how new toads arose. What will make the toad let go this grip? And that mad priest cut off a male toad’s hind legs in the midst of its copulation--but the dying animal did not relax that blind grasp to which nature drove it. Spallanzani mused over his bizarre experiment. “This persistence of the toad,” he said, “is due less to his obtuseness of feeling than to the vehemence of his passion.” In his sniffing search for knowledge which let him stop at nothing, he was led by an instinct that drove him into heartless experiments on animals--but it made him do equally cruel and fantastic tests on himself. He studied the digestion of food in the stomach, he gulped down hollowed-out blocks of wood with meat inside them, then tickled his throat and made himself vomit them up again so that he could find out what had happened to the meat inside the blocks. He kept insanely at this self-torture, until, as he admitted at last, a horrid nausea made him stop the experiments. Spallanzani held immense correspondences with half the doubters and searchers of Europe. By mail he was a great friend of that imp, Voltaire. He complained that there were few men of talent in Italy, the air was too humid and foggy--he became a leader of that impudent band of scientists and philosophers who unknowingly prepared the bloodiest of revolutions while they tried so honestly to find truth and establish happiness and justice in the world. These men believed that Spallanzani had spiked once for all that nonsense about animals--even the tiniest ones--arising spontaneously. Led by Voltaire they cracked vast jokes about the Vegetative Force and its parents, the pompous Buffon and his laboratory boy, Father Needham. “But there is a Vegetative Force,” cried Needham, “a mysterious something--I’ll admit you can’t see it or weigh it--that can make life arise out of gravy or soup or out of nothing at all, perhaps. Maybe it can stand all of that roasting that Spallanzani applies to it, but what it needs particularly is a very elastic air to help it. And when Spallanzani boils his flasks for an hour, he hurts the elasticity of the air inside the flasks!” Spallanzani was up in arms in a moment, and bawled for Needham’s experiments. “Has he heated air to see if it got less elastic?” The Italian waited for experiments--and got only words. “Then I’ll have to test it out myself,” he said, and once again he put seeds in rows of flasks and sealed off their necks in a flame--and boiled them for an hour. Then one morning he went to his laboratory, and cracked off the neck of one of his bottles....