How to make a mouse: The bizarre 'recipes' borne of spontaneous generation
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| portrait of a mouse visitor andyswapp 2010 |
I come across articles that I really enjoy and often quite randomly this at The wonderful Mother Nature Network by Laura Moss is one such and is a wonderment. I am especially fond of theories like the flat earth society, the treatments recommended by Pliny and these are no exception either. I believe them to be true. Especially how to make Barnacle geese and the making of a mouse!
It was once widely accepted that the planet was flat and the sun
orbited the Earth. It was also commonly believed you could make a mouse by
placing a dirty shirt in a container of wheat.
"If a soiled shirt is placed in the opening of a vessel
containing grains of wheat, the reaction of the leaven in the shirt with fumes
from the wheat will, after approximately 21 days, transform the wheat into
mice," wrote 17th-century Flemish chemist Jean Baptiste van Helmont.
This "recipe" for mice was a product of the body of
thinking known as spontaneous generation.
People didn't have an explanation for how maggots materialized on
old meat or how molluscs seemed to appear in the sea, so they surmised that
such creatures simply arose from inanimate matter.
The idea wasn't unique to Europeans like Helmont. The Babylonians,
Indians and Chinese drew similar conclusions based on their own observations.
Animal 'recipes'
Although people across the globe came up with a variety of ways in
which animals were created, Helmont's "recipes" are perhaps the most
creative.
For example, take his method of scorpion manufacture: Carve an
indentation in a brick, fill it with basil, cover the hole with another brick
and place it in the sun.
In a matter of days, "fumes from the basil, acting as a
leavening agent, will have transformed the vegetable matter into veritable
scorpions," he wrote.
How did other animals supposedly spontaneously generate?
Bees were once thought to swarm from the corpses of partially buried
dead bulls.
Salamanders were born from fire. It's likely that people sitting
around fires saw the unfortunate animals — which often hide in logs — crawling
out of the flames.
Because cities lacked sewage systems and proper waste disposal
methods, they threw trash into the streets, which attracted rats and led people
to believe rats were generated from garbage.
After observing flooded rivers leaving behind both mud and frogs, it
was assumed that wet soil created the amphibians.
English scientist Edward Heron-Allen wrote one of the most detailed
descriptions of spontaneous generation when he described the origin of barnacle
geese.
He said they hung from their beaks along the sea until they grew
feathers and either fell into the water or flew away.
"I have frequently seen, with my own eyes, more than a thousand
of these small bodies of birds, hanging down on the sea-shore from one piece of
timber, enclosed in their shells, and already formed," he wrote.
