HEAT UPON LIVING MATTER. 141 
of it because, with some few exceptions, his investi- 
gations were conducted in a manner which cannot be 
improved upon at the present day, and because his 
reasonings in reference to them are characterised by 
great sagacity and fairness—allowance being made 
for the actual state of knowledge in his time. The 
work of the learned Abbé to which I shall especially 
refer is entitled in the admirable French translation 
by Jean Senebier, “ Opusclues de Physique Animale et 
Végétale,’ the translation itself having been published 
at Geneva in 1767. 
Reflecting upon the import of experiments of his 
own that he had just recorded, in which living organ- 
isms were found in closed vessels containing infusions 
of certain vegetable seeds after these closed vessels had 
been immersed in boiling water for half, or, in some 
cases, nearly three-quarters of an hour, Spallanzani 
frankly avows * that if the first of the new organisms 
had not come into being by some such independent 
method as that suggested by, Needham, they must 
have appeared either because certain ‘germs’ fron 
which they had been derived had been able to resist 
the destructive influence of boiling water for nearly 
three-quarters of an hour, or because, after the cool- 
ing of the closed vessels, some of the organisms 
observed had passed from the air through certain 
* Loc. cit. p. 48. 
