Maggots Spontaneously Generate from Decaying Meat

Early Britannica entries reflected a nearly universal belief grounded in naked-eye observation: when meat decayed, maggots appeared without obvious cause. The problem was invisible, fly eggs are too small to see without magnification. Francesco Redi challenged this in 1668, but his work remained controversial for over a century. Only after Pasteur's sterile experiments in the 1860s and the refinement of microscopy did the scientific consensus shift decisively. What seemed like spontaneous generation was simply the triumph of evolutionary strategies predating human record-keeping.