He saw that Needham’s idea that boiling water outside the flask damaged the elasticity of the air inside was nonsense, nothing less. But how to prove this, how to seal up the flasks without driving out the air? His devilish ingenuity came to help him, and he took another flask, put seeds into it, and filled it partly with pure water. Then he rolled the neck of the bottle around in a hot flame until it melted down to a tiny narrow opening--very, very narrow, but still open to the air outside. Next he let the flask cool--now the air inside must be the same as the air outside--then he applied a tiny flame to the now almost needle-fine opening. In a jiffy the flask was sealed--without expelling any of the air from the inside. Content, he put the bottle in boiling water and watched it bump and dance in the kettle for an hour and while he watched he recited verses and hummed gay tunes. He put the flask away for days, then one morning, sure of his result, he came to his laboratory to open it. He lighted a candle; he held it close to the flask neck; carefully he broke the seal--wh-i-s-s-s-t! But the flame blew _away_ from the flask this time--the elasticity of the air inside the flask was greater than that outside! All of the long boiling had not damaged the air at all--it was even more elastic than before--and elasticity was what Needham said was necessary for his wonderful Vegetative Force. The air in the flask was super-elastic, but fishing drop after drop of the soup inside, Spallanzani couldn’t find a single little animal. Again and again, with the obstinacy of a Leeuwenhoek, he repeated the same experiment. He broke flasks and spilled boiling water down his shirt-front, he seared his hands, he made vast tests that had to be done over--but always he confirmed his first result. V Triumphant he shouted his last experiment to Europe, and Needham and Buffon heard it, and had to sit sullenly amid the ruins of their silly theory, there was nothing to say--Spallanzani had spiked their guns with a simple fact. Then the Italian sat down to do a little writing himself. A virtuoso in the laboratory, he was a fiend with his quill, when once he was sure his facts had destroyed Needham’s pleasant myth about life arising spontaneously. Spallanzani was sure now that even the littlest beasts had to come--always--from beasts that had lived before. He was certain too, that a wee microbe always remained a microbe of the same kind that its parents had been, just as a zebra doesn’t turn into a giraffe, or have musk-oxen for children, but always stays a zebra--and has zebra babies. “In short,” shouted Spallanzani, “Needham is wrong, and I have proved that there is a law and order in the science of animals, just as there is in the working of the stars.”