92 THE LIFE OF PASTEUR 



leaving his vases in boiling water during an hour. He advised 

 him to try with less heat. 



The public took an interest in this quarrel. In an opuscule 

 entitled Singularities of Nature (1769), Voltaire, a born jour- 

 nalist, laughed at Needham, whom he turned into an Irish 

 Jesuit to amuse his readers. Joking on this race of so-called 

 eels which began life in the gravy of boiled mutton, he said : 

 " At once several philosophers exclaimed at the wonder and 

 said, ' There is no germ; all is made, all is regenerated by a 

 vital force of nature.' 'Attraction,' said one; 'Organized 

 matter,' said another, ' they are organic molecules which have 

 found their casts.' Clever physicists were taken in by a 

 Jesuit." 



In those pages, lightly penned, nothing remained of what 

 Voltaire called "the ridiculous mistake, the unfortunate ex- 

 periments of Needham, so triumphantly refuted by M. Spal- 

 lanzani and rejected by whoever has studied nature at all." 

 "It is now demonstrated to sight and to reason that there is 

 no vegetable, no animal but has its own germ." In his 

 Philosophic Dictionary, at the word God, " It is very strange," 

 said Voltaire, " that men should deny a creator and yet attri- 

 bute to themselves the power of creating eels ! ' ' The Abbe 

 Needham, meeting with these religious arguments, rather 

 unexpected from Voltaire, endeavoured to prove that the 

 hypothesis of spontaneous generation was in perfect accordance 

 with religious beliefs. But both on Needham's side and on 

 Spallanzani's there was a complete lack of conclusive proofs. 



Philosophic argumentation always returned to the fore. As 

 recently as 1846 Ernest Bersot (a moralist who became later 

 a director of the Ecole Normale) wrote in his book on Spiritual- 

 ism : "The doctrine of spontaneous generation pleases 

 simplicity -loving minds ; it leads them far beyond their own 

 expectations. But it is yet only a private opinion, and, were 

 it recognized, its virtue would have to be limited and narrowed 

 down to the production of a few inferior animals." 



That doctrine was about to be noisily re-introduced. 



On December 20, 1858, a correspondent of the Institute, 

 M. Pouchet, director of the Natural History Museum of Bouen, 

 sent to the Acade"mie des Sciences a Note on Vegetable and 

 Animal Proto-organisms spontaneously Generated in Artificial 

 Air and in Oxygen Gas. The note began thus: "At this 



