3 ms·
Didn’t they believe that only for stuff too small for them to easily see? I’m pretty sure they still knew that chickens came from eggs, for example.
by tshaddox 5y ago
Didn’t they believe that only for stuff too small for them to easily see? I’m pretty sure they still knew that chickens came from eggs, for example.
- heavyset_go 5y agoIt applied to vermin like mice, too. From Wired[1]: > In the 17th century, physician and chemist Jean Baptiste van Helmont, apparently sick of there not being enough mice in this world, devised a home recipe for their manufacture. It was quite simple, really, far simpler than getting a girl mouse and boy mouse together with a tiny bottle of wine: “If a soiled shirt is placed in the opening of a vessel containing grains of wheat,” he wrote, “the reaction of the leaven in the shirt with fumes from the wheat will, after approximately 21 days, transform the wheat into mice.” [1] https://www.wired.com/2014/06/fantastically-wrong-how-to-grow-a-mouse-out-of-wheat-and-sweaty-shirts/ https://www.wired.com/2014/06/fantastically-wrong-how-to-gro...
- WalterBright 5y agoJust because somebody wrote something doesn't mean that people in general believed it.
- heavyset_go 5y agoRead the whole article, these notions were widespread for millennia, it wasn't just van Helmont who thought that.