“Out of the strong came forth sweetness”
Swarm of bees generated from a lion’s carcass on a tin of Lyle’s Golden Syrup.
What I remember most vividly from Matthew Cobb’s lecture Life Before Linnaeus, given last May at the Manchester Museum to accompany the exhibition A Place for Everything celebrating the Linnaeus Tercentenary, are the examples of spontaneous generation he presented - mice generated from grain, lion carcasses giving birth to bees, and the like (he actually mentioned the wonderfully out-of-date Golden Syrup tins with their biblical symbolism as well).
I came across his work again when reading his article on seventeenth-century Dutch naturalist and microscopist Jan Swammerdam in the latest issue of TLS last weekend, and I think I can already predict what will stay stuck in my mind this time: Swammerdam was the first to demonstrate that movement - the contraction of muscles - was not, as Descartes had claimed, caused by the influx of animal spirits into the muscle.
More on Swammerdam’s experiment (which consisted of placing a frog heart in an air-tight syringe) here.
