Since very early times men have believed that living things could come from non-living things. Some people thought that frogs and toads developed from the mud of ponds, rats from the river Nile, and insects from dew or from rotting waste. Vergil wrote that slime begat frogs. Centuries later, other men wrote that water produced fish, and that mice came from old rags. This notion that living things can come from lifeless matter is known as the theory of "spontaneous generation". Today we know that living things can come only from other living things. Redi, in the 1600s, was the first person to prove that insects do not originate from rotting matter. From his experiment, Redi wrote that maggots appear in decaying meat simply because the eggs of flies hatch there, and not from spontaneous generation.

Q. Underline a sentence which suggests that Vergil lived hundreds of years before Redi.