342 SUPPLEMENT 
also reproduce the parts which should be cut off, and as he 
could make no experiment on the appendages, he only tried 
upon the body, and found that it might be cut into twenty- 
six parts, and that each part reproduced a complete animal, 
so that by a very simple calculation he showed that from a 
single individual of two inches long, which might be cut into 
eight parts, and those successively into the same number, in 
proportion as they became perfect, there would be produced 
at the end of the fourth year 32,768 individuals. 
This faculty which the worms possess of reproduction, when 
mutilated, was equally demonstrated in animals apparently 
more complicated, that is, in the actinie, by the Abbé Dicque- 
mare. He proved, in fact, that their body might be divided 
into a sufficiently great number of parts, provided that in the 
strip which was cut off, a portion of the mouth should be 
preserved. 
Up to this time, although these facts appeared sufficiently 
extraordinary, nevertheless, as they had not been observed, 
except in animals but little elevated in the living scale, and 
all the parts of which, to a certain point, were similar, a small 
number of persons remained incredulous, or rather, as the 
experiments were made upon animals not very common, nor 
easily to be procured, perhaps less attention was paid to them. 
But when, in 1764, Father Boscovich, in a letter to M. de la 
Condamine, announced that snails whose head was cut off, 
reproduced another altogether similar, as was proved by the 
experiments of the Abbe Spallanzani, a great number of per- 
sons massacred an immense quantity of snails with the idea of 
verifying these experiments. Voltaire himself, as may be seen 
in his questions in the Encyclopedia, article Colimacon, com- 
menced experimentalist. But he showed as little skill as a 
physiologist, as, on another occasion, he did in geology. In 
1769, the celebrated Adanson, after having made trial on more 
than 1500 snails, denied that the individuals from which he 
