A Brief History of Creation by Bill Mesler Page A

twist. Needham would live to see what he had done, and it would haunt him.
    J OHN NEEDHAM was an English Catholic who came of age at a time when it was dangerous to be a Catholic in England. In 1688, the country’s last Catholic king, James II, was deposed by the country’s parliament andreplaced by the protestant William of Orange, the grandson of William the Silent from Delft, and one of the many heads of state who had at one time or another visited Antonie van Leeuwenhoek to see his microscopes. William of Orange’s installment set in motion a series of Catholic uprisings, known as the Jacobite rebellions, each of which was violently put down.
    Needham was a minor British aristocrat from an old family that had been split in two by religion. Needham’s father, the head of the family’s Catholic branch, worried about the direction the country was taking and decided to send his young son abroad to Douai, France, a few miles south of Lille, where a school had been established for English Catholics fleeing the violence in their home country. While officially a seminary, the school could compete with the better universities of the continent. Needham quickly became its brightest star, winning a reputation as a brilliant experimentalist and natural philosopher. Many of his professors even considered him their superior. He was eventually ordained, but Needham decided to devote his life to scientific inquiry. He chose the life of a secular priest, one who has forsaken the right to perform clerical services for a regular career. A series of teaching posts followed, including a professorship at the English university in Lisbon, although he abandoned the position after little more than a year. Needham was a frail man, deathly pale, with delicate, effeminate features. He told friends the hot Portuguese weather didn’t agree with him.
    Soon after his return to London, he turned his attentions to the field of microscopy, the branch of science he found most compelling. Within a year, he had made an important discovery that would shape the course of the rest of his life. Needham had been studying a batch of blighted wheat under his microscope when something in one of his samples caught his attention. There were fine, off-white fibers he had never seen before. He thought they might tell him something about the nature of the blight and decided to see what would happen if he placed them in water. To his surprise, the fibers soon teemed with microscopic creatures.
    A year later, he returned to the same batch of wheat and repeated the experiment. Once again, the creatures—like van Leeuwenhoek, Needham called them “eels”—came to life yet again, the water having seeminglyreanimated them from the dead. In 1745, Needham published his work in the Philosophical Transactions , but he took care not to draw any broad conclusions, simply reporting the facts as he had observed them. A year later, more of his observations of little “eels” that had seemingly emerged out of a simple paste of flour and water were published in the journal.
    Needham’s papers were translated and subsequently published in Paris, where they caught the eye of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, the director of King Louis XIV’s botanical gardens, the Jardin du Roi. Buffon was a polymath who excelled in the wide array of fields he set his mind to. He was one of the most intuitively gifted mathematicians of his time. He came up with a solution to one of the earliest-known problems in the mathematical field of geometric probability by determining the mathematical odds that a needle dropped from a certain height would land within a demarcated set of lines. The problem became known as “Buffon’s needle.” Yet it was in the natural sciences that he would leave his greatest mark.
    As a young man, Buffon showed little evidence of the genius that would one day be so apparent. At university, he was an average