The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth

e called, and who are very properly called, but who dislike extremely to be called-"Scientists." They dislike that word so much that from the columns of Nature, which was from

d when they emerge to any sort of publicity, "distinguished scientists" and "

ngton was a Fellow of the Royal Society and a former president of the Chemical Society, and Professor Redwood was Professor of Physiology in the Bond Street College of the L

ngton was short and very, very bald, and he stooped slightly; he wore gold-rimmed spectacles and cloth boots that were abundantly cut open because of his numerous corns, and Professor Redwood was entirely ordinary in hi

fessor Redwood rose to eminence-I do not clearly remember how he rose to eminence! I know he was very eminent, and that's all. Things of this sort grow. I fancy it was a v

oat, and hear fragments of a lecture or paper that he imagined himself to be reading audibly; and once I remember-one midday in the vanished past-when the British Association was at Dover, coming on Section C or D, or some such letter, which had taken u

zling from the lantern and another sound that kept me there, still out of curiosity, until the lights were unexpectedly turned up. And then I perceived that this sound

e on the screen-and so it was again so soon as the darkness was restored. I remember him then as a most ordinary, slightly nervous-looking

ol class in half-an-hour-and so far as I can remember now, he was propounding an improvement of Professor Armstrong's Heuristic method, whereby at the cost of three or four hundred pounds' worth of apparatus, a total neglect of all other studies and the undivided atten

ordinary. And that you will find is the case with "scientists" as a class all the world over. What there is great

ry much. To witness some queer, shy, misshapen, grey-headed, self-important, little discoverer of great discoveries, ridiculously adorned with the wide ribbon of some order of chivalry and holding a reception of his fellow-men, or to read the anguish of Nature at the

when he chose this calling, when he consecrated his life to the alkaloids and their kindred compounds, had some inkling of the vision,-more than an inkling. Without some such inspiration, for such glories and positions only as a "scientist" may expect, what young man would have given h

e can be no doubt of it now-he among his fellows was different, he was