Life and

Life and (a few) letters 21
then father-in-law, Giuseppe Balsamo Crivelli, suddenly died, at the age of
seventy-four. Maggi took over his deceased master’s academic duties, initially on a
temporary basis, not only the teaching of zoology and comparative anatomy, but
also the role of acting director of the anatomy museum. Over the following
months, while the appointment procedure for Balsamo’s successor were
underway, the education ministry decided another division of the former natural
history chair: comparative anatomy and physiology were separated from zoology,
and while Maggi was now permanently appointed to cover the former, Pietro
Pavesi (1844-1907), at the time teaching in Genoa, took on zoology (Landucci
1996:3386), and Torquato Taramelli from Udine succeeded on Maggi’s previous
position in mineralogy and geology. 67 With the termination of his six-year
diversion through the mineral realm, Maggi had now attained a permanent
position in the life sciences, and with his promotion to a full professorship two
years later (1877), he had reached the final academic position, where he would stay
for the remaining twenty-eight years of his life. Therefore, his entire career,
indeed, almost his entire life was spent in Lombardy, mostly between Pavia in the
south, and the Lago Maggiore in the north, a range of a mere 120 kilometres. He
continued to be a member of the University of Pavia, from his undergraduate
studies until the time of his early death, when he was approaching the age of sixtyfive
in 1905. In comparison with his contemporary or even slightly older
colleagues, this extreme local stability appears quite extraordinary, while otherwise,
his academic career did not quite exceed the boundaries of average, including a
number of senior functions (dean of faculty for three triennial terms, membership
in the national Public Education Council).
The year 1878 represented a climax of Maggi’s early career. The Società italiana
di scienze naturali put him in charge of organising their annual meeting in Varese,
bringing the elite of Italy’s naturalists into the area he was most familiar with.
Thus, his colleagues from south of the river Ticino came to visit the numerous
places of geological and palaeoethnological interest around the lakes and in the
adjacent valleys, with their prehistoric lake and cave dwellings, human remains and
artefacts, some of which he himself presented in several papers given at the
meeting and published in the Atti of the Society (M77-81). This highly successful
congress also marked a turning point in Maggi’s research directions: For one, he
almost completely abandoned geology and palaeoethnology (with a minor
exception in 1900, see M261 bis). 68 Secondly, his approach to the study of
microorganisms changed drastically, moving away from questions of the origin of
life (heterogenesis) towards a new concept of cell formation out of independently
living subcellular organisms, which he called “plastidules” (i plastiduli, Fig. 2), a
term unfortunately almost identical to Ernst Haeckel’s plastidules (which Maggi
67 On the development of earth sciences in Pavia under Taramelli, see Braga (1995).
68 Nevertheless, at the time of his death, the Palaeoethnological Bulletin of Rome’s Museo Pigorini
remembered Maggi’s relevant publications of the 1870s (Anon. 1905).