SPALLANZANI 237 



There is indeed a gamey flavour about Spallanzani, and it 

 is easy to understand his popularity among his students. 

 They must have found it invariably safe to shelter themselves, 

 their hopes and ambitions, within the shadow of a personality 

 so mountainous as his. 



Lazzaro Spallanzani was born at Scandiano in Modena on 

 January 12, 1729. His father, an advocate, gave him his 

 first lessons, and subsequently he passed into the Jesuit College 

 at Reggio di Modena with the intention, we are told, of entering 

 that body. But as a matter of fact he passed into the Univer- 

 sity of Bologna, and thus entered upon the critical phase in 

 his intellectual development, for his celebrated cousin, Laura 

 Bassi, was Professor of Physics at Bologna and it is believed 

 that her influence was the principal factor in determining his 

 taste for natural philosophy. 



By the year 1758 he had become Professor of Logic and 

 Geometry in the University of Reggio, and in 1760 he was 

 translated to Modena to hold the Chair of Physics. The 

 youthful professor had already made a reputation when in 

 1769 he became the first to hold the newly appointed Chair of 

 Natural History in the University of Pavia, which at the 

 instigation of Maria Theresa, then ruling over Austrian 

 Lombardy, was being reorganised and re-equipped. 



He inaugurated his series of lectures with " an elegant 

 Latin discourse " on the controversy between the Preformists 

 and the Epigenists. Buffon, whose flights of imagination were 

 well calculated to arouse antipathy in a hard-headed and 

 prudent investigator like Spallanzani, was propagating his 

 doctrine of " organic molecules " — a Buffon-like embroidery 

 of the preformation hypothesis tending towards epigenesis. 

 Spallanzani, an orthodox believer in the preformation faith, 

 accepted it as sheer epigenesis (vide Dissertations Relative to the 

 Natural History of Animals and Vegetables ," vol. ii. p. 160, 

 London, 1784), and, wielding that damaging epithet " imagina- 

 tive," made battery and assault on the speculative Frenchman. 



Plus 9a change, plus c'est la meme chose. The controversy 

 in a more developed form continues still, and it looked at one 

 time, before Roux's initial experiments with the frog's egg 

 were carried further, as if the preformation idea of Spallanzani 

 and his supporters might prove to be sound. 



More than one of Buffon 's claims were attacked with spirit 



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