The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth

The Food of the Gods and How It
Came to
by H.G. Wells

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Title: The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth
Author: H.G. Wells
Release Date: March 24, 2004 [EBook #11696]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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[Illustration: He sat down in a garden, with his back to a house that
overlooked all London.]

THE FOOD OF THE GODS AND HOW IT CAME TO EARTH
H.G. WELLS
[Illustration]
CONTENTS.
BOOK I.
THE DAWN OF THE FOOD.
I. THE DISCOVERY OF THE FOOD
II. THE EXPERIMENTAL FARM
III. THE GIANT RATS
IV. THE GIANT CHILDREN
V. THE MINIMIFICENCE OF MR. BENSINGTON
BOOK II.
THE FOOD IN THE VILLAGE.
I. THE COMING OF THE FOOD
II. THE BRAT GIGANTIC
BOOK III.
THE HARVEST OF THE FOOD.
I. THE ALTERED WORLD
II. THE GIANT LOVERS
III. YOUNG CADDLES IN LONDON

IV. REDWOOD'S TWO DAYS
V. THE GIANT LEAGUER

BOOK I.
THE DAWN OF THE FOOD.

THE FOOD OF THE GODS.
* * * * *
CHAPTER THE
FIRST.
THE DISCOVERY OF THE FOOD.
I.
In the middle years of the nineteenth century there first became
abundant in this strange world of ours a class of men, men tending for
the most part to become elderly, who are 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 the first their distinctive and characteristic paper, it is as
carefully excluded as if it were--that other word which is the basis of all
really bad language in this country. But the Great Public and its Press
know better, and "Scientists" they are, and when they emerge to any
sort of publicity, "distinguished scientists" and "eminent scientists" and
"well-known scientists" is the very least we call them.
Certainly both Mr. Bensington and Professor Redwood quite merited
any of these terms long before they came upon the marvellous
discovery of which this story tells. Mr. Bensington 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 London University, and he had been grossly libelled by
the anti-vivisectionists time after time. And they had led lives of
academic distinction from their very earliest youth.
They were of course quite undistinguished looking men, as indeed all
true Scientists are. There is more personal distinction about the
mildest-mannered actor alive than there is about the entire Royal
Society. Mr. Bensington 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 his appearance. Until they happened
upon the Food of the Gods (as I must insist upon calling it) they led
lives of such eminent and studious obscurity that it is hard to find
anything whatever to tell the reader about them.
Mr. Bensington won his spurs (if one may use such an expression of a
gentleman in boots of slashed cloth) by his splendid researches upon
the More Toxic Alkaloids, and Professor 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
voluminous work on Reaction Times with numerous plates of
sphygmograph tracings (I write subject to correction) and an admirable
new terminology, that did the thing for him.
The general public saw little or nothing of either of these gentlemen.
Sometimes at places like the Royal Institution and the Society of Arts it
did in a sort of way see Mr. Bensington, or at least his blushing
baldness and something of his collar and coat, 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 up its quarters in a public-house, and following
two, serious-looking ladies with paper parcels, out of mere curiosity,
through a door labelled "Billiards" and "Pool" into a scandalous
darkness, broken only by a magic-lantern circle