Thus dropped to the ground, in Spallanzani’s eyes, Needham’s singular theory, this famous vegetative force, this occult virtue. Yet Needham did not own himself beaten. He retorted that Spallanzani had much weakened, perhaps destroyed, the vegetative force of the infused substances by leaving his vases in boiling water during an hour. He advised him to try with less heat. The public took an interest in this quarrel. In an opuscule entitled _Singularities of Nature_ (1769), Voltaire, a born journalist, laughed at Needham, whom he turned into an Irish Jesuit to amuse his readers. Joking on this race of so-called eels which began life in the gravy of boiled mutton, he said: “At once several philosophers exclaimed at the wonder and said, ‘There is no germ; all is made, all is regenerated by a vital force of nature.’ ‘Attraction,’ said one; ‘Organized matter,’ said another, ‘they are organic molecules which have found their casts.’ Clever physicists were taken in by a Jesuit.” In those pages, lightly penned, nothing remained of what Voltaire called “the ridiculous mistake, the unfortunate experiments of Needham, so triumphantly refuted by M. Spallanzani and rejected by whoever has studied nature at all.” “It is now demonstrated to sight and to reason that there is no vegetable, no animal but has its own germ.” In his _Philosophic Dictionary_, at the word God, “It is very strange,” said Voltaire, “that men should deny a creator and yet attribute to themselves the power of creating eels!” The Abbé Needham, meeting with these religious arguments, rather unexpected from Voltaire, endeavoured to prove that the hypothesis of spontaneous generation was in perfect accordance with religious beliefs. But both on Needham’s side and on Spallanzani’s there was a complete lack of conclusive proofs. Philosophic argumentation always returned to the fore. As recently as 1846 Ernest Bersot (a moralist who became later a director of the Ecole Normale) wrote in his book on Spiritualism: “The doctrine of spontaneous generation pleases simplicity-loving minds; it leads them far beyond their own expectations. But it is yet only a private opinion, and, were it recognized, its virtue would have to be limited and narrowed down to the production of a few inferior animals.” That doctrine was about to be noisily re-introduced. * * * * *