Microbe Hunters Read online

  The devil of prejudice was talking again. Now Spallanzani began to sharpen his razors for his fellow priest—the Italian was a nasty fellow who liked to slaughter ideas of any kind that were contrary to his—he began to whet his knives, I say, for Needham. Then one night, alone in his laboratory, away from the brilliant clamor of his lectures and remote from the gay salons where ladies adored his knowledge, he felt sure he had found the loophole in Needham's experiment. He chewed his quill, he ran his hands through his shaggy hair, “Why have those little animals appeared in that hot gravy, and in those soups made from seeds?” Undoubtedly because Needham didn't heat the bottles long enough, and surely because he didn't plug them tight enough!

  Here the searcher in him came forward—he didn't go to his desk to write Needham about it—instead he went to his dusty glass-strewn laboratory, and grabbed some flasks and seeds, and dusted off his microscope. He started out to test, even to defeat, if necessary, his own explanations. Needham didn't heat his soups long enough—maybe there are little animals, or their eggs, which can stand a tremendous heat, who knows? So Spallanzani took some large glass flasks, round bellied with tapering necks. He scrubbed and washed and dried them till they stood in gleaming rows on his table. Then he put seeds of various kinds into some, and peas and almonds into others, and following that poured pure water into all of them. “Now I won't only heat these soups for a short time,” he cried, “but I'll boil them for an hour!” He got his fires ready—then he grunted: “But how shall I close up my flasks? Corks might not be tight enough, they might let these infinitely wee things through.” He pondered. “I've got it, I'll melt the necks of my bottles shut in a flame. I'll close them with glass—nothing, no matter how small, can sneak through glass!”

  So he took his shining flasks one by one, and rolled their necks gently in a hot flame till each one was fused completely shut. He dropped some of them when they got too hot—he sizzled the skin of his fingers, he swore, and got new flasks to take the smashed ones' places. Then when his flasks were all sealed and ready, “Now for some real heat,” he muttered, and for tedious hours he tended his bottles, as they bumped and danced in caldrons of boiling water. One set he boiled for a few minutes only. Another he kept in boiling water for a full hour.

  At last, his eyes near stuck shut with tiredness, he lifted the flasks of stew steaming from their kettles, and put them carefully away—to wait for nervous anxious days to see whether any little animals would grow in them. And he did another thing, a simple one which I almost forgot to tell you about, he made another duplicate set of stews in flasks plugged up with corks, not sealed, and after boiling these for an hour put them away beside the others.

  Then he went off for days to do the thousand things that were not enough to use up his buzzing energy. He wrote letters to the famous naturalist Bonnet, in Switzerland, telling him his experiments; he played football; he went hunting and fishing. He lectured about science, and told his students not of dry technicalities only, but of a hundred things—from the marvelous wee beasts that Leeuwenhoek had found in his mouth to the strange eunuchs and the veiled multitudinous wives of Turkish harems. At last he vanished and students and professors—and ladies—asked: “Where is the Abbé Spallanzani?”

  He had gone back to his rows of flasks of seed soup.

  3

  He went to the row of sealed flasks first, and one by one he cracked open their necks, and fished down with a slender hollow tube to get some of the soup inside them, in order to see whether any little animals at all had grown in these bottles that he had heated so long, and closed so perfectly against the microscopic creatures that might be floating in the dust of the outside air. He was not the lively sparkling Spallanzani now. He was slow, he was calm. Like some automaton, some slightly animated wooden man he put one drop of seed-soup after another before his lens.

  He first looked at drop after drop of the soup from the sealed flasks which had been boiled for an hour, and his long looking was rewarded by—nothing. Eagerly he turned to the bottles that had been boiled for only a few minutes, and cracked their seals as before, and put drops of the soup inside them before his lens.

  “What's this?” he cried. Here and there in the gray field of his lens he made out an animalcule playing and sporting about—these weren't large microbes, like some he had seen—but they were living little animals just the same.

  “Why, they look like little fishes, tiny as ants,” he muttered—and then something dawned on him——“These flasks were sealed—nothing could get into them from the outside, yet here are little beings that have stood a heat of boiling water for several minutes!”

  He went with nervous hands to the long row of flasks he had only stoppered with corks—as his enemy Needham had done—and he pulled out the corks, one by one, and fished in the bottles once more with his tubes. He growled excitedly, he got up from his chair, he seized a battered notebook and feverishly wrote down obscure remarks in a kind of scrawled shorthand. But these words meant that every one of the flasks which had been only corked, not sealed, was alive with little animals! Even the corked flasks which had been boiled for an hour, “were like lakes in which swim fishes of all sizes, from whales to minnows.”

  “That means the little animals get into Needham's flasks from the air!” he shouted. “And besides I have discovered a great new fact: living things exist that can stand boiling water and still live—you have to heat them to boiling almost an hour to kill them!”

  It was a great day for Spallanzani, and though he did not know it, a great day for the world. Spallanzani had proved that Needham's theory of little animals arising spontaneously was wrong—just as the old master Redi had proved the idea was wrong that flies can be bred in putrid meat. But he had done more than that, for he had rescued the baby science of microbe hunting from a fantastic myth, a Mother Goose yarn that would have made all scientists of other kinds hold their noses at the very mention of microbe hunting as a sound branch of knowledge.

  Excited, Spallanzani called his brother Nicolo, and his sister, and told them his pretty experiment. And then, bright-eyed, he told his students that life only comes from life; every living thing has to have a parent—even these wretched little animals! Seal your soup flasks in a flame, and nothing can get into them from outside. Heat them long enough, and everything, even those tough beasts that can stand boiling, will be killed. Do that, and you'll never find any living animals arising in any kind of soup—you could keep it till doomsday. Then he threw his work at Needham's head in a brilliant sarcastic paper, and the world of science was thrown into an uproar. Could Needham really be wrong? asked thoughtful men, gathered in groups under the high lamps and candles of the scientific societies of London and Copenhagen, of Paris and Berlin.

  The argument between Spallanzani and Needham didn't stay in the academies among the highbrows. It leaked out through heavy doors onto the streets and crept into stylish drawing-rooms. The world would have liked to believe Needham, for the people of the eighteenth century were cynical and gay; everywhere men were laughing at religion and denying any supreme power in nature, and they delighted in the notion that life could arise haphazardly. But Spallanzani's experiments were so clear and so hard to answer, even with the cleverest words. . .

  Meanwhile the good Needham had not been resting on his oars exactly; he was an expert at publicity, and to help his cause along he went to Paris and lectured about his mutton gravy, and in Paris he fell in with the famous Count Buffon. This count was rich; he was handsome; he loved to write about science; he believed he could make up hard facts in his head; he was rather too well dressed to do experiments. Besides he really knew some mathematics, and had translated Newton into French. When you consider that he could juggle most complicated figures, that he was a rich nobleman as well, you will agree that he certainly ought to know—without experimenting—whether little animals could come to life without fathers or mothers! So argued the godless wits of Paris.

  Needham and Buffon g
ot on famously. Buffon wore purple clothes and lace cuffs that he didn't like to muss up on dirty laboratory tables, with their dust and cluttered glassware and pools of soup spilled from accidentally broken flasks. So he did the thinking and writing, while Needham messed with the experiments. These two men then set about to invent a great theory of how life arises, a fine philosophy that every one could understand, that would suit devout Christians as well as witty atheists. The theory ignored Spallanzani's cold facts, but what would you have? It came from the brain of the great Buffon, and that was enough to upset any fact, no matter how hard, no matter how exactly recorded.

  “What is it that causes these little animals to arise in mutton gravy, even after it has been heated, my Lord?” you can hear Needham asking of the noble count. Count Buffon's brain whirled in a magnificent storm of the imagination, then he answered: “You have made a great, a most momentous discovery, Father Needham. You have put your finger on the very source of life. In your mutton gravy you have uncovered the very force—it must be a force, everything is force—which creates life!”

  “Let us then call it the Vegetative Force, my Lord,” replied Father Needham.

  “An apt name,” said Buffon, and he retired to his perfumed study and put on his best suit and wrote—not from dry laboratory notes or the exact records of lenses or flasks but from his brain—he wrote, I say, about the marvels of this Vegetative Force that could make little animals out of mutton gravy and heated seed soups. In a little while Vegetative Force was on everybody's tongue. It accounted for everything. The wits made it take the place of God, and the churchmen said it was God's most powerful weapon. It was popular like a street song or an off color story—or like present day talk about relativity.

  Worst of all, the Royal Society tumbled over itself to get ahead of the men in the street, and elected Needham a Fellow, and the Academy of Sciences of Paris made him an Associate. Meanwhile in Italy Spallanzani began to walk up and down his laboratory and sputter and rage. Here was a danger to science, here was ignoring of cold facts, without which science is nothing. Spallanzani was a priest of God, and God was perhaps reasonably sacred to him, he didn't argue with any one about that—but here was a pair of fellows who ignored his pretty experiments, his clear beautiful facts!

  But what could Spallanzani do? Needham and Buffon had deluged the scientific world with words—they had not answered his facts, they had not shown where Spallanzani's experiment of the sealed flasks was wrong. The Italian was a fighter, but he liked to fight with facts and experiments, and here he was laying about him in this fog of big words, and hitting nothing. Spallanzani stormed and laughed and was sarcastic and bitter about this marvelous hoax, this mysterious Vegetative Force. It was the Force, prattled Needham, that had made Eve grow out of Adam's rib. It was the Force, once more, that gave rise to the remarkable worm-tree of China, which is a worm in winter, and then marvelous to say is turned by the Vegetative Force into a tree in summer! And much more of such preposterous stuff, until Spallanzani saw the whole science of living things in danger of being upset, by this alleged Vegetative Force with which, next thing people knew, Needham would be turning cows into men and fleas into elephants.

  Then suddenly Spallanzani had his chance, for Needham made an objection to one of his experiments. “Your experiment does not hold water,” he wrote to the Italian, “because you have heated your flasks for an hour, and that fierce heat weakens and so damages the Vegetative Force that it can no longer make little animals.”

  This was just what the energetic Spallanzani was waiting for, and he forgot religion and large classes of eager students and the pretty ladies that loved to be shown through his museum. He rolled up his wide sleeves and plunged into work, not at a writing desk but before his laboratory bench, not with a pen, but with his flasks and seeds and microscopes.

  4

  “So Needham says heat damages the Force in the seeds, does he? Has he tried it? How can he see or feel or weigh or measure this Vegetative Force? He says it is in lie seeds, well, we'll heat the seeds and see!”

  Spallanzani got out his flasks once more and cleaned them. He brewed mixtures of different kinds of seeds, of peas and beans and vetches with pure water, until his work room almost ran over with flasks—they perched on high shelves, they sat on tables and chairs, they cluttered the floor so it was hard to walk around.

  “Now, we'll boil a whole series of these flasks different lengths of time, and see which one generates the most little animals,” he said, and then doused one set of his soups in boiling water for a few minutes, another for a half hour, another for an hour, and still another for two hours. Instead of sealing them in the flame he plugged them all up with corks—Needham said that was enough—and then he put them carefully away to see what would happen. He waited. He went off fishing and forgot to pull up his rod when a fish bit, he collected minerals for his museum, and forgot to take them home with him. He plotted for higher pay, he said masses, and studied the copulation of frogs and toads—and then disappeared once more to his dim work room with its regiments of bottles and weird machines. He waited.

  If Needham were right, the flasks boiled for minutes should be alive with little animals, but the ones boiled for an hour or two hours should be deserted. He pulled out the corks one by one, and looked at the drops of soup through his lens and at last laughed with delight—the bottles that had been boiled for two hours actually had more little animals sporting about in them than the ones he had heated for a few minutes.

  “Vegetative Force, what nonsense! so long as you only plug up your flasks with corks the little animals will get in from the air. You can heat your soups till you're black in the face—the microbes will get in just the same and grow, after the broth has cooled.”

  Spallanzani was triumphant, but then he did the curious thing that only born scientists ever do—he tried to beat his own idea, his darling theory—by experiments he honestly and shrewdly planned to defeat himself. That is science! That is the strange self-forgetting spirit of a few rare men, those curious men to whom truth is more dear than their own cherished whims and wishes. Spallanzani walked up and down his narrow work room, hands behind him, meditating—“Wait, maybe after all Needham has guessed right, maybe there is some mysterious force in these seeds that strong heat might destroy.”

  Then he cleaned his flasks again, and took some seeds, but instead of merely boiling them in water, he put them in a coffee-roaster and baked them till they were soot-colored cinders. Next he poured pure distilled water over them, growling: “Now if there was a Vegetative Force in those seeds, I have surely roasted it to death.”

  Days later when he came back to his flasks, with their soups brewed from the burned seeds, he smiled a sarcastic smile—a smile that meant squirmings for Buffon and Needham—for as one bottle after another yielded its drops of soup to his lens, every drop from every bottle was alive with wee animals that swam up and down in the liquid and went to and fro, living their funny limited little lives as gayly as any animals in the best soup made from unburned seeds. He had tried to defeat his own theory, and so trying had licked the pious Needham and the precious Buffon. They had said that heat would kill their Force so that no little animals could arise—and here were seeds charred to carbon, furnishing excellent food for the small creatures—this so-called Force was a myth! Spallanzani proclaimed this to all of Europe, which now began to listen to him.

  Then he relaxed from his hard pryings into the loves and battles and deaths of little animals by making deep studies of the digestion of food in the human stomach—and to do this he experimented cruelly on himself. This was not enough, so he had to launch into weird investigations in the hot dark attic of his house, on the strange problem of how bats can keep from bumping into things although they cannot see. In the midst of this he found time to help educate his little nephews and to take care of his brother and sister, obscure beings who did not share his genius—but they were of his blood, and he loved them.

 
But he soon came back to the mysterious question of how life arises, that question which his religion taught him to ignore, to accept with blind faith as a miracle of the Creator. He didn't work with little animals only; instead he turned his curiosity onto larger ones, and began vast researches on the mating of toads. “What is the cause of the violent and persistent way in which the male toad holds the female?” he asked himself, and his wonder at this strange event set his ingenious brain to devising experiments of an unheard—of barbarity.

  He didn't do them out of any fiendish whim to hurt the father toad—but this man must know every fact that could possibly be known about how new toads arose. What will make the toad let go this grip? And that mad priest cut off the male toad's hind legs in the midst of its copulation—but the dying animal did not relax that blind grasp to which nature drove it. Spallanzani mused over his bizarre experiment. “This persistence of the toad,” he said, “is due less to his obtuseness of feeling than to the vehemence of his passion.”

  In his sniffing search for knowledge which let him stop at nothing, he was led by an instinct that drove him into heartless experiments on animals—but it made him do equally cruel and fantastic tests on himself. He studied the digestion of food in the stomach, he gulped down hollowed-out blocks of wood with meat inside them, then tickled his throat and made himself vomit them up again so that he could find out what had happened to the meat inside the blocks. He kept insanely at this self-torture, until, as he admitted at last, a horrid nausea made him stop the experiments.