Bonnet told Spallanzani’s perplexity about the way little animals multiplied to his friend, the clever but now unknown de Saussure. And this fellow turned his sharp eye through his clear lenses onto the breeding habits of animalcules. In a short while he wrote a classic paper, telling the fact that when you see two of the small beasts stuck together, they haven’t come together to breed. On the contrary--marvelous to say--these coupled beasts are nothing more nor less than an old animalcule which is dividing into two parts, into two new little animals! This, said de Saussure, was the only way the microbes ever multiplied--the joys of marriage were unknown to them! Reading this paper, Spallanzani rushed to his microscope hardly believing such a strange event could be so--but careful looking showed that de Saussure was right. The Italian wrote the Swiss a fine letter congratulating him; Spallanzani was a fighter and something of a plotter; he was infernally ambitious and often jealous of the fame of other men, but he lost himself in his joy at the prettiness of de Saussure’s sharp observations. Spallanzani and these naturalists of Geneva were bound by a mysterious cement--a realization that the work of finding facts and fitting facts together to build the high cathedral of science is greater than any single finder of facts or mason of facts. They were the first haters of war--the first citizens of the world, the first genuine internationalists. Then Spallanzani was forced into one of the most devilishly ingenious researches of his life. He was forced into this by his friendship for his pals in Geneva and by his hatred of another piece of scientific claptrap almost as bad as the famous Vegetative Force. An Englishman named Ellis wrote a paper saying de Saussure’s observations about the little animals splitting into two was all wrong. Ellis admitted that the little beasts might occasionally break into two. “But that,” cried Ellis, “doesn’t mean they are multiplying! It simply means,” he said, “that one little animal, swimming swiftly along in the water, bangs into another one amidships--and breaks him in half! That’s all there is to de Saussure’s fine theory. “What is more,” Ellis went on, “little animals are born from each other just as larger beasts come from their mothers. When I look carefully with my microscope, I can actually see young ones inside the old ones, and looking still more closely--you may not believe it--I can see grandchildren inside these young ones.” “Rot!” thought Spallanzani. All this stuff smelled very fishy to him, but how to show it wasn’t true, and how to show that animalcules multiplied by breaking in two?