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Updated: June 26, 2025
The air which we breathe is loaded with impalpable dust that awaits, for ages perhaps, proper conditions of heat and moisture to give it an ephemeral life that it will lose and acquire by turns. In 1707, Spallanzani found it possible, eleven times in succession, to suspend the life of rotifers submitted to desiccation, and to call it back again by moistening this organic dust with water.
However, Spallanzani's views were supposed to be upon the right side, and those of the others fell into discredit; although the fact was that Spallanzani had not made good his views. Well, then, the subject continued to be revived from time to time, and experiments were made by several persons; but these experiments were not altogether satisfactory.
They lodged in a corner adjoining the library, spending their days in studious seclusion, their evenings in conversation with some of the first scholars of Europe: the learned botanist Scopoli, Spallanzani, Volta, and Father Fontana, the famous mathematician. In such surroundings Vivaldi might have pursued his task contentedly enough, but for the thought of Fulvia's future.
And so far does this go, that some experimentalists have carefully examined the lower orders of animals, among them the Abbe Spallanzani, who made a number of experiments upon snails and salamanders, and have found that they might mutilate them to an incredible extent; that you might cut off the jaw or the greater part of the head, or the leg or the tail, and repeat the experiment several times, perhaps, cutting off the same member again and again; and yet each of those types would be reproduced according to the primitive type: nature making no mistake, never putting on a fresh kind of leg, or head, or tail, but always tending to repeat and to return to the primitive type.
Cut off the legs, the tail, the jaws, separately or all together, and, as Spallanzani showed long ago, these parts not only grow again, but the redintegrated limb is formed on the same type as those which were lost. The new jaw, or leg, is a newt's, and never by any accident more like that of a frog.
Spallanzani and Hunter had shown in the previous century that digestion is in some sort a solution of foods; but little advance was made upon their work until 1824, when Prout detected the presence of hydrochloric acid in the gastric juice.
The famous Italians, Redi and Spallanzani, had led the way in their experiments, and the latter had reached the conclusion that there is no vegetable and no animal that has not its own germ. But heterogenesis became the burning question, and Pouchet in France, and Bastian in England, led the opposition to Pasteur.
However, Spallanzani's views were supposed to be upon the right side, and those of the others fell into discredit; although the fact was that Spallanzani had not made good his views. Well, then, the subject continued to be revived from time to time, and experiments were made by several persons; but these experiments were not altogether satisfactory.
Maria Theresa and Joseph II. fostered the intellectual progress of Lombardy; Spallanzani published his researches on natural philosophy; Volta discovered the pile which bears his name; a new era in poetry was created by Parinl; another in criminal jurisprudence by Beccaria; history was reconstructed by Muratori; mathematics promoted by Lagrange, and astronomy by Oriani; and Alfieri restored Italian letters to their primitive splendor.
The question now became very hotly debated. Spallanzani, an Italian naturalist, took up opposite views to those of Needham and Buffon, and by means of certain experiments he showed that it was quite possible to stop the process by boiling the water, and closing the vessel in which it was contained.
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