90 THE LIFE OF PASTEUR 



Padua, Vallisneri, recognized that the grub in a fruit is also 

 hatched from an egg deposited by an insect before the 

 development of the fruit. 



The theory of spontaneous generation, still losing ground, 

 appeared to be vanquished when the invention of the micro- 

 scope at the end of the seventeenth century brought fresh 

 arguments to its assistance. Whence came those thousands 

 of creatures, only distinguishable on the slide of the micro- 

 scope, those infinitely small beings which appeared in rain 

 water as in any infusion of organic matter when exposed to 

 the air? How could they be explained otherwise than through 

 spontaneous generation, those bodies capable of producing 

 1,000,000 descendants in less than forty-eight hours. 



The world of salons and of minor courts was pleased to 

 have an opinion on this question. The Cardinal of Polignac, 

 a diplomat and a man of letters, wrote in his leisure moments 

 a long Latin poem entitled the Anti- Lucretius. After scout- 

 ing Lucretius and other philosophers of the same school, the 

 cardinal traced back to one Supreme Foresight the mechan- 

 ism and organization of the entire world. By ingenious 

 developments and circumlocutions, worthy of the Abbe Delille, 

 the cardinal, while vaunting the wonders of the microscope, 

 which he called "eye of our eye," saw in it only another 

 prodigy oilered us by Almighty Wisdom. Of all those accu- 

 mulated and verified arguments, this simple notion stood out : 

 " The earth, which contains numberless germs, has not pro- 

 duced them. Everything in this world has its germ or seed." 



Diderot, who disseminated so many ideas (since borrowed 

 by many people and used as if originated by them), wrote 

 in some tumultuous pages on nature: "Does living matter 

 combine with living matter? how? and with what result? 

 And what about dead matter? " 



About the middle of the eighteenth century the problem 

 was again raised on scientific ground. Two priests, one an 

 Englishman, Needham, and the other an Italian, Spallanzani, 

 entered the lists. Needham, a great partisan of spontaneous 

 generation, studied with Buffon some microscopic animalculae. 

 Buffon afterwards built up a whole system which became 

 fashionable at that time. The force which Needham found in 

 matter, a force which he called productive or vegetative, and 

 which he regarded as charged with the formation of the organic 

 world, Buffon explained by saying that there are certain primi- 



