Frogs in Pants: The pervy story your Sex-Ed teacher skipped!

What would you call a man who puts pants on frogs? Crazy comes to mind. Perhaps even the word pervert. But in retrospect, we know that the man in question, rarely heard of today, was actually a brilliant 18th century scientist. Why brilliant? Because, putting pants on frogs led him to crack the secret of reproduction.

That’s right! Lazzaro Spallanzani discovered the purpose of sperms — for the first time in human history! And hang on for this bit of trivia: He was a Catholic priest. Of course!

It is most curious to think that as mankind — self-conscious, curious, and highly intelligent though we are — only figured out the purpose for sperms thousands of years AFTER taming fire and agriculture, domesticating animals, inventing wheels and ships, and achieving great feats of civilization.

Think about it — we knew how to prevent a dead body from decomposing using chemical concoctions, housed in inextricably engineered buildings — the mummies in Pyramids; we even knew how to transport fresh water for hundreds of miles, over mountains and valleys, using the gravity of earth alone — the Roman aqueducts; but we did not know why we discharged bodily fluids every time we made love, until only in the 1760s! That’s still two hundred years after we realized that we live in a round planet that goes around the sun!

Better late than never. Thank the Lord, or rather, the Priest!

It’d sound very silly now, because we know the science, but before Spallanzani, people believed in the ‘spontaneity’ theory of life. Nope, that is not referring to getting a tattoo when drunk or flying to New Zealand after a break up. It was meant much more literally — people thought life generated from non-life. Just like that!

How else would you explain maggots on a dead body? Or flies on a rotting beef? Something about the meat must have given rise to the flies and maggots. Leave grains in a bag, unattended. Within weeks you’d find rats swarming all over it!

The curious amongst us started questioning this thinking by the 16th century. Life, they thought, can only come from life. Why would a rat come from grains, when chickens lay eggs, and when hatched, only chickens come out? Eggs must have a purpose. Sperms must too. Curious and perhaps lonely intellectuals, much like Spallanzani, already observed little wiggly things within the male discharge, when put under the lens of crude forerunners of what we would now call a microscope.

Spallanzani got to work. With the process of elimination in mind, he separated frogs by sex — males and females. Of the males, he further separated them into two groups — he dressed up one group with his tailor-made, custom-fit “taffeta” pants. The other group was butt-naked.

Next step? Release them to find females, and procreate. In other words, wait and watch frog porn. You know, as your average priests do!

Sure enough, the naked frogs eventually found mates and later tadpoles were born. The fancy frogs had their pants stained during their ‘sexy time’, but the disappointed females never had their eggs showered with sperm. Ergo, no tadpoles!

Sperm, it was clear, was the missing ingredient! The implication reached far beyond frogs having sex: If baby frogs come from two parents uniting, so must all other living things! The exact mechanics would take some time to develop, but our sperm-obsessed priest’s designer tighty-whities for frogs was a big leap in science!

Although forgotten from most science books today, Lazzaro still stands at a square in Scandiano, Italy, with a frog in one hand, and a magnifying glass in another. It doesn’t take much imagination to guess what our beloved priest could have possibly been staring at.

I haven’t seen the statue in person, but I am sure the frog has a violated expression written all over its face.