Meanwhile this man who was so rigidly honest in his experiments, who would never report anything but the truth of what he found amid the smells and poisonous vapors and shining machines of his laboratory, this superbly honest scientist, I say, was planning low tricks to increase his pay as Professor at Pavia. Spallanzani, the football player, the climber of mountains and explorer, this Spallanzani whined to the authorities at Vienna about his feeble health--the fogs and vapors of Pavia were like to make him die, he said. To keep him the Emperor had to increase his pay and double his vacations. Spallanzani laughed and cynically called his lie a political gesture! He always got everything he wanted. He got truth by dazzling experiments and close observation and insane patience; he obtained money and advancement by work--and by cunning plots and falsehoods; he received protection from religious persecution by becoming a priest! Now, as he grew older, he began to hanker for wild researches in regions remote from his little laboratory. He must visit the site of ancient Troy whose story thrilled him so; he must see the harems and slaves and eunuchs, which to him were as much a part of natural history as his bats and toads and little animals of the seed infusions. He pulled wires, and at last the Emperor Joseph gave him a year’s leave of absence and the money for a trip to Constantinople--for his failing health, which had never been more superb. So Spallanzani put his rows of flasks away and locked his laboratory and said a dramatic and tearful good-by to his students; on the journey down the Mediterranean he got frightfully sea-sick, he was shipwrecked--but didn’t forget to try to save the specimens he had collected on some islands. The Sultan wined and dined him, the doctors of the seraglios let him study the customs of the beauteous concubines ... and afterward, good eighteenth century European that he was, Spallanzani told the Turks that he admired their hospitality and their architecture, but detested their custom of slavery and their hopeless fatalistic view of life.... “We Westerners, through this new science of ours, are going to conquer the seemingly unavoidable, the apparently eternal torture and suffering of man,” you can imagine him telling his polite but stick-in-the-mud Oriental friends. He believed in an all powerful God, but while he believed, the spirit of the searcher, the fact finder, flashed out of his eye, burdened all his thought and talk, forced him to make excuses for God by calling him Nature and the Unknown, compelled him to show that he had appointed himself first-assistant to God in the discovery and even the conquering of this unknown Nature. [Illustration: LAZZARO SPALLANZANI]