The Descent of Man Other Stories | Page 5

their other duties, they had to
support his family: to pay the butcher and baker, and provide for Jack's
schooling and Millicent's dresses. The Professor's household was a
modest one, yet it tasked his ideas to keep it up to his wife's standard.
Mrs. Linyard was not an exacting wife, and she took enough pride in
her husband's attainments to pay for her honours by turning Millicent's
dresses and darning Jack's socks, and going to the College receptions
year after year in the same black silk with shiny seams. It consoled her
to see an occasional mention of Professor Linyard's remarkable
monograph on the Ethical Reactions of the Infusoria, or an allusion to
his investigations into the Unconscious Cerebration of the Amoeba.
Still there were moments when the healthy indifference of Jack and
Millicent reacted on the maternal sympathies; when Mrs. Linyard
would have made her husband a railway-director, if by this
transformation she might have increased her boy's allowance and given
her daughter a new hat, or a set of furs such as the other girls were
wearing. Of such moments of rebellion the Professor himself was not
wholly unconscious. He could not indeed understand why any one
should want a new hat; and as to an allowance, he had had much less
money at college than Jack, and had yet managed to buy a microscope
and collect a few "specimens"; while Jack was free from such
expensive tastes! But the Professor did not let his want of sympathy
interfere with the discharge of his paternal obligations. He worked hard
to keep the wants of his family gratified, and it was precisely in the
endeavor to attain this end that he at length broke down and had to
cease from work altogether.
To cease from work was not to cease from thought of it; and in the
unwonted pause from effort the Professor found himself taking a
general survey of the field he had travelled. At last it was possible to
lift his nose from the loom, to step a moment in front of the tapestry he
had been weaving. From this first inspection of the pattern so long
wrought over from behind, it was natural to glance a little farther and
seek its reflection in the public eye. It was not indeed of his special task
that he thought in this connection. He was but one of the great army of
weavers at work among the threads of that cosmic woof; and what he

sought was the general impression their labour had produced.
When Professor Linyard first plied his microscope, the audience of the
man of science had been composed of a few fellow-students,
sympathetic or hostile as their habits of mind predetermined, but versed
in the jargon of the profession and familiar with the point of departure.
In the intervening quarter of a century, however, this little group had
been swallowed up in a larger public. Every one now read scientific
books and expressed an opinion on them. The ladies and the clergy had
taken them up first; now they had passed to the school-room and the
kindergarten. Daily life was regulated on scientific principles; the daily
papers had their "Scientific Jottings"; nurses passed examinations in
hygienic science, and babies were fed and dandled according to the
new psychology.
The very fact that scientific investigation still had, to some minds, a
flavour of heterodoxy, gave it a perennial interest. The mob had broken
down the walls of tradition to batten in the orchard of forbidden
knowledge. The inaccessible goddess whom the Professor had served
in his youth now offered her charms in the market-place. And yet it was
not the same goddess after all, but a pseudo-science masquerading in
the garb of the real divinity. This false goddess had her ritual and her
literature. She had her sacred books, written by false priests and sold by
millions to the faithful. In the most successful of these works, ancient
dogma and modern discovery were depicted in a close embrace under
the lime-lights of a hazy transcendentalism; and the tableau never failed
of its effect. Some of the books designed on this popular model had
lately fallen into the Professor's hands, and they filled him with
mingled rage and hilarity. The rage soon died: he came to regard this
mass of pseudo-literature as protecting the truth from desecration. But
the hilarity remained, and flowed into the form of his idea. And the
idea--the divine, incomparable idea--was simply that he should avenge
his goddess by satirizing her false interpreters. He would write a skit on
the "popular" scientific book; he would so heap platitude on platitude,
fallacy on fallacy, false analogy on false analogy, so use his superior
knowledge to abound in the sense of the ignorant, that even the gross