A Brief History of Creation by Bill Mesler Page B

student at best. Soon after taking a degree in law, his murky involvement in a duel forced him into exile abroad for several years. But he returned to Paris at a fortuitous time. The country was about to undertake a massive overhaul of its navy, and somebody was needed to study the strength of different timbers used to construct ships. Buffon had made some important friends by then, and the task was entrusted to him. By the time he finished, he had so impressed the minister in charge that he was handed the prestigious position at the Jardin du Roi.
    Buffon greatly expanded the size and mission of the Jardin, transforming what had once been merely a glorified medicinal garden into a world-class botanical collection, adding a museum and a zoo, and gathering together some of the country’s greatest botanists. About the same time that Needham began his investigations on wheat, it fell upon Buffon, as director of the Jardin, to produce an inventory of everything the garden contained. Buffon embraced the task with relish. In his hands, the simple inventory became a project to write a dictionary in the mold of Bayle’s, except that it would be devoted entirely to natural philosophy. And by “natural philosophy,”Buffon quite literally intended it to encompass virtually everything then known to human beings regarding the living world.
    This broad scope included a subject that puzzled him: the generation of life. It was too important a subject to overlook, but Buffon was uncomfortable with the prevailing theories of the time. When Buffon read about Needham’s experiments, he thought the Englishman was on to something, even if Needham himself didn’t quite understand yet how important it was. Needham, Buffon thought, was someone he could work with to tackle the mystery of life’s origin.
    I N THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY, most natural philosophers believed that every type of living organism on the face of the Earth had always existed, from the very beginning of the Earth’s creation. Every organism—every dog, every bird, every human being, and every worm—had been created by God in the form of something called “germs.” These germs were like the seeds of plants, scattered at the dawn of creation by God over the face of the planet, like a gardener would scatter a future crop. Germs were tiny, far too small to be seen even with the aid of a microscope. And each such germ contained even tinier germs, the germs of every successive generation that any creature would ever spawn. They were all stacked inside each other, like Russian nesting dolls. The infinite nature of the theory was the one thing that people had a hard time coming to grips with, but one of the theory’s most influential proponents, the French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche, would point out that it was no harder to believe in germs than in the life cycles of plants. * “One can say that in a single apple pit,” he said, “there would be apple trees, apples, and the seeds of apples for infinite or almost infinite centuries.”
    Some believed that, in humans, germs were contained in male semen. Others saw them in the female’s egg. In France, the theory was called “embodiment”; in England, “preformation” or “preexistence.” It wasn’t justconjecture. Proponents of preformation could see the evidence all around them in the natural world. The transformation of caterpillars into butterflies was taken as a sign of God’s blueprint unfolding. The bulb of a tulip with its endless unfolding layers seemed a clue to the infinite layers of tulips that would spring forth, one after another. In the tiny eggs of frogs, microscopists thought they could see future generations of frogs waiting to be born. Those who believed in preformation were never short of evidence.
    The theory was an old one, but it had gained traction in the late seventeenth century as a response to the theories of