Then a strange sight startled him, not less dramatic for its unbelievable littleness. The beast--it was shaped like a small rod--began to get thinner and thinner in the middle. At last the two parts of it were held together by the thickness of a spider web thread, and the two thick halves began to wriggle desperately--and suddenly they jerked apart. There they were, two perfectly formed, gently gliding little beasts, where there had been one before. They were a little shorter but otherwise they couldn’t be told from their parent. Then, what was more marvelous to see, these two children of the first one in a score of minutes split up again--and now there were four where there had been one! Spallanzani did this ingenious trick a dozen times and got the same result and saw the same thing; and then he descended on the unlucky Ellis like a ton of brick and flattened into permanent obscurity Ellis and his fine yarn about the children and the grandchildren inside the little animals. Spallanzani was sniffish, he condescended, he advised, he told Ellis to go back to school and learn his a b c’s of microbe hunting. He hinted that Ellis wouldn’t have made his mistake if he’d read the fine paper of de Saussure carefully, instead of inventing preposterous theories that only cluttered up the hard job of getting genuine new facts from a stingy Nature. A scientist, a really original investigator of nature, is like a writer or a painter or a musician. He is part artist, part cool searcher. Spallanzani told himself stories, he conceived himself the hero of a new epic exploration, he compared himself--in his writings even--to Columbus and Vespucci. He told of that mysterious world of microbes as a new universe, and thought of himself as a daring explorer making first groping expeditions along its boundaries only. He said nothing about the possible deadliness of the little animals--he didn’t like to engage, in print, in wild speculations--but his genius whispered to him that the fantastic creatures of this new world were of some sure but yet unknown importance to their big brothers, the human species.... VII Early in the year 1799, as Napoleon started thoroughly smashing an old world to pieces, and just as Beethoven was knocking at the door of the nineteenth century with the first of his mighty symphonies, war-cries of that defiant spirit of which Spallanzani was one of the chief originators--in the year 1799, I say, the great microbe hunter was struck with apoplexy. Three days later he was poking his energetic and irrepressible head above the bedclothes, reciting Tasso and Homer to the amusement and delight of those friends who had come to watch him die. But though he refused to admit it, this, as one of his biographers says, was his _Canto di Cigno_, his swan song, for in a few days he was dead.