He returned to Pavia and on his way there I wonder what his thoughts were--did he see himself slinking into the town, avoided by old admirers and a victim of malignant hissing whispers? Possibly, but as he got near the gates of Pavia a strange thing happened--for a mob of adoring students came out to meet him, told him they would stick by him, escorted him with yells of joy to his old lecture chair. The once self-sufficient, proud man’s voice became husky--he blew his nose--he could only stutteringly tell them what their devotion meant to him. Then the investigating committee had him and his accusers appear before it, and knowing Spallanzani as you already do, you may imagine the shambles that followed! He proved to the judges that the alleged stolen birds were miserably stuffed, draggle-feathered creatures which would have disgraced the cabinet of a country school--they had been merely pitched out. He had traded the lost snakes and the armadillo to other museums and Pavia had profited by the trade; not only so, but Volta, his chief accuser, had himself stolen precious stones from the museum and given them to his friends.... The judges cleared him of all guilt--though it is to-day not perfectly sure that he wasn’t a little guilty; Volta and his complotters were fired from the University, and all parties, including Spallanzani, were ordered by the Emperor to stop their deplorable brawling and shut up--this thing was getting to be a smell all over Europe--students were breaking up the classroom furniture about it, and other universities were snickering at such an unparalleled scandal. Spallanzani took a last crack at his routed enemies; he called Volta a perfect bladder full of wind and invented hideous and unprintably improper names for Scarpa and Scopoli; then he returned peacefully to his microbe hunting. Many times in his long years of looking at the animalcules he had wondered how they multiplied. Often he had seen two of the wee beasts stuck together, and he wrote to Bonnet: “When you see two individuals of any animal kind united, you naturally think they are engaged in reproducing themselves.” But were they? He jotted his observations down in old notebooks and made crude pictures of them, but, impetuous as he was in many things, when it came to experiments or drawing conclusions--he was almost as cagy as old Leeuwenhoek had been.