shirt. In about twenty-one days, the ferment arising from the dirty
shirt reacting with the odor from the corn will effect the transmutation
of the wheat into mice. 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. To question this is
to question reason, sense and experience. If he doubts this let him go
to Egypt, and there he will find the fields swarming with mice, begot of
the mud of Nylus, to the great calamity of the in-habitants."[8]