KIRCHER'S EXPERIMENT 35 



serves to attract the living flies to breed in the corpses 

 of their comrades and to drop their eggs therein; and I 

 hold that it is of little use to make the experiment in a 

 copper vessel heated by warm ashes, for without these 

 accessories the worms would have bred in the dead bodies. 

 I also frankly confess my inability to understand how 

 those small worms, described by Kircher, could change 

 into small flies without at first, for the space of some 

 days, being converted into egg-like balls [pupae] , nor how 

 those small flies could hatch out so small and then grow 

 larger, as all flies, gnats, mosquitoes and butterflies, as 

 I have observed many times, on escaping from the chrys- 

 alis are of the same size that they keep through life. 

 But, oh, how this single, ill-considered experiment of 

 Kircher must have delighted and elated those persons 

 who fondly imagined that they could re-create man from 

 man's dead body by means of fermentation, or other sim- 

 ilar or still more extraordinary processes! I am of the 

 opinion that they might have used it as a base for their 

 theories, and would have boastfully said : 



" Thus 'do great sages openly proclaim 

 That Phoenix dies and is reborn the same." 



Whereupon these same boasters would perhaps have be- 

 stirred themselves about that incredible undertaking, 

 which has been attempted more than once, as I have 

 heard but have not believed. The absurd tale is not 

 worth the trouble of confutation, for as Martial says: 



" Turpe est difficiles habere nugas, 

 Et stultus labor est ineptiarum." 



Even Father Kircher, in the eleventh book of the " Sub- 

 terranean World," has nobly stood out against the folly 



