Once more, an Italian, the Abbe Spallanzani, a worthy successor and representative of Redi in his acuteness, his ingenuity, and his learning, subjected the experiments and the conclusions of Needham to a searching criticism.  It might be true that Needham’s experiments yielded results such as he had described, but did they bear out his arguments?  Was it not possible, in the first place, he had not completely excluded the air by his corks and mastic?  And was it not possible, in the second place, that he had not sufficiently heated his infusions and the superjacent air?  Spallanzani joined issue with the English naturalist on both these pleas, and he showed that if, in the first place, the glass vessels in which the infusions were contained were hermetically sealed by fusing their necks, and if, in the second place, they were exposed to the temperature of boiling water for three-quarters of an hour,[8] no animalcules ever made their appearance within them.  It must be admitted that the experiments and arguments of Spallanzani furnish a complete and a crushing reply to those of Needham.  But we all too often forget that it is one thing to refute a proposition, and another to prove the truth of a doctrine which, implicitly or explicitly, contradicts that proposition; and the advance of science soon showed that though Needham might be quite wrong, it did not follow that Spallanzani was quite right.

[Footnote 8:  See Spallanzani, Opere, vi. pp. 42 and 51.]

Modern Chemistry, the birth of the latter half of the eighteenth century, grew apace, and soon found herself face to face with the great problems which biology had vainly tried to attack without her help.  The discovery of oxygen led to the laying of the foundations of a scientific theory of respiration, and to an examination of the marvellous interactions of organic substances with oxygen.  The presence of free oxygen appeared to be one of the conditions of the existence of life, and of those singular changes in organic matters which are known as fermentation and putrefaction.  The question of the generation of the infusory animalcules thus passed into a new phase.  For what might not have happened to the organic matter of the infusions, or to the oxygen of the air, in Spallanzani’s experiments?  What security was there that the development of life which ought to have taken place had not been checked or prevented by these changes?

The battle had to be fought again.  It was needful to repeat the experiments under conditions which would make sure that neither the oxygen of the air, nor the composition of the organic matter, was altered in such a manner as to interfere with the existence of life.