After many months he returned overland through the Balkan Peninsula, escorted by companies of crack soldiers, entertained by Bulgarian dukes and Wallachian Hospodars. At last he came to Vienna, to pay his respects to his boss and patron, the Emperor Joseph II—it was the dizziest moment, so far as honors went, of his entire career. Drunk with success, he thought, you may imagine, of how all of his dreams had come true, and then——

VI

While Spallanzani was on his triumphant voyage a dark cloud gathered away to the south, at his university, the school at Pavia that he had done so much to bring back to life. For years the other professors had watched him take their students away from them, they had watched—and ground their tusks and sharpened their razors—and waited.

Spallanzani by tireless expeditions and through many fatigues and dangers had made the once empty Natural History Cabinet the talk of Europe. Besides he had a little private collection of his own at his old home in Scandiano. One day, Canon Volta, one of his jealous enemies, went to Scandiano and by a trick got into Spallanzani’s private museum; he sniffed around, then smiled an evil grin—here were some jars, and there a bird and in another place a fish, and all of them were labeled with the red tags of the University museum of Pavia! Volta sneaked away hidden in the dark folds of his cloak, and on the way home worked out his malignant plans to cook the brilliant Spallanzani’s goose; and just before Spallanzani got home from Vienna, Volta and Scarpa and Scopoli let hell loose by publishing a tract and sending it to every great man and society in Europe, and this tract accused Spallanzani of the nasty crime of stealing specimens from the University of Pavia and hiding them in his own little museum at Scandiano.

His bright world came down around his ears; in a moment he saw his gorgeous career in ruins; in hideous dreams he heard the delighted cackles of men who praised him and envied him; he pictured the triumph of men whom he had soundly licked with his clear facts and experiments—he imagined even the return to life of that fool Vegetative Force....

But in a few days he came back on his feet, the center of a dreadful scandal, it is true, but on his feet with his back to the wall ready to face his accusers. Gone now was the patient hunter of microbes and gone the urbane correspondent of Voltaire. He turned into a crafty politician, he demanded an investigating committee and got it, he founded Ananias Clubs, he fought fire with fire.

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.

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?

He was first of all a hard scientist, and he knew that it was one thing to say Ellis was feeble-minded, but quite another to prove that the little animals didn’t bump into each other and so knock each other apart. In a moment the one way to decide it came to him——“All I have to do,” he meditated, “is to get one little beast off by itself, away from every other one where nothing whatever can bump into it—and then just sit and watch through the microscope to see if it breaks into two.” That was the simple and the only way to do it, no doubt, but how to get one of these infernally tiny creatures away from his swarms of companions? You can separate one puppy from a litter, or even a little minnow from its myriads of brothers and sisters. But you can’t reach in with your hands and take one animalcule by the tail—curse it—it is a million times too small for that.

Then this Spallanzani, this fellow who reveled in gaudy celebrations and vast enthusiastic lecturings, this hero of the crowd, this magnifico, crawled away from all his triumphs and pleasures to do one of the cleverest and most marvelously ingenious pieces of patient work in his hectic life. He did no less a thing than to invent a sure method of getting one animalcule—a few twenty-five thousandths of an inch long—a living animalcule, off by itself.

He went to his laboratory and carefully put a drop of seed soup swarming with animalcules on a clean piece of crystal glass. Then with a clean hair-fine tube he put a drop of pure distilled water—that had not a single little animal in it—on the same glass, close to the drop that swarmed with microbes.

“Now I shall trap one,” he muttered, as he trained his lens on the drop that held the little animals. He took a fine clean needle, he stuck it carefully into the drop of microbe soup—and then made a little canal with it across to the empty water drop. Quickly he turned his lens onto the passageway between the two drops, and grunted satisfaction as he saw the wriggling cavorting little creatures begin to drift through this little canal. He grabbed for a little camel’s-hair brush——“There! there’s one of the wee ones—just one, in the water drop!” Deftly he flicked the little brush across the small canal, wiping it out, so cutting off the chance of any other wee beast getting into the water drop to join its lonely little comrade.

“God!” he cried. “I’ve done it—no one’s ever done this before—I’ve got one animalcule all by himself; now nothing can bump him, now we’ll see if he’ll turn into two new ones!” His lens hardly quivered as he sat with tense neck and hands and arms, back bent, eye squinting through the glass at the drop with its single inhabitant. “How tiny he is,” he thought—“he is like a lone fish in the spacious abysses of the sea.”

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.

Great Egyptian kings kept their names alive for posterity by having the court undertaker embalm them into expensive and gorgeous mummies. The Greeks and Romans had their likenesses wrought into dignified statues. Paintings exist of a hundred other distinguished men. What is left for us to see of the marvelous Spallanzani?

In Pavia there is a modest little bust of him and in the museum near by, if you are interested, you may see—his bladder. What better epitaph could there be for Spallanzani? What relic could more perfectly suggest the whole of his passion to find truth, that passion which stopped at nothing, which despised conventions, which laughed at hardship, which ignored bad taste and the feeble pretty fitness of things?

He knew his bladder was diseased. “Well, have it out after I’m dead,” you can hear him whisper as he lay dying. “Maybe you’ll find an astonishing new fact about diseased bladders.” That was the spirit of Spallanzani. This was the very soul of that cynical, sniffingly curious, coldly reasoning century of his—the century that discovered few practical things—but the same century that built the high clean house for Faraday and Pasteur, for Arrhenius and Emil Fischer and Ernest Rutherford to work in.