The doctor solemnly assures us that he himself
had witnessed this wonderful fact, and continues, "The mice are born
full-grown; there are both males and females. To reproduce the species
it suffices to pair them."
"Scoop out a hole in a brick," he says further, "put into it some sweet
basil, crushed, lay a second brick upon the first so that the hole may
be completely covered. Expose the two bricks to the sun, and at the end
of a few days the smell of the sweet basil, acting as a ferment, will
change the herb into real scorpions."[7]
[Footnote 7: "Louis Pasteur, His Life and Labors," p. 89.]
Sir Thomas Browne, the famous author of "Religio Medici," had expressed
a doubt as to whether mice may be bred by putrifaction; but another
scientist, Alexander Ross, disposed of this suggestion by the following
line of argument which was supposed to be conclusive as a _reductio ad
absurdum_:
"So may he (Sir Thomas Browne) doubt whether in cheese and timber worms
are generated; or if beetles and wasps in cows' dung; or if butterflies,
locusts, grasshoppers, shell-fish, snails, eels, and such like, be
procreated of putrid matter, which is apt to receive the form of that
creature to which it is by formative power disposed.
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