The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth | Page 2

of Redwood's tracings.

I watched the lantern slides come and go, and listened to a voice (I
forget what it was saying) which I believe was the voice of Professor
Redwood, and there was a sizzling 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 was the
sound of the munching of buns and sandwiches and things that the
assembled British Associates had come there to eat under cover of the
magic-lantern darkness.
And Redwood I remember went on talking all the time the lights were
up and dabbing at the place where his diagram ought to have been
visible 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 dark man, with an air of being preoccupied with
something else, and doing what he was doing just then under an
unaccountable sense of duty.
I heard Bensington also once--in the old days--at an educational
conference in Bloomsbury. Like most eminent chemists and botanists,
Mr. Bensington was very authoritative upon teaching--though I am
certain he would have been scared out of his wits by an average Board
School 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 attention
of a teacher of exceptional gifts, an average child might with a peculiar
sort of thumby thoroughness learn in the course of ten or twelve years
almost as much chemistry as one could get in one of those
objectionable shilling text-books that were then so common....
Quite ordinary persons you perceive, both of them, outside their
science. Or if anything on the unpractical side of ordinary. And that
you will find is the case with "scientists" as a class all the world over.
What there is great of them is an annoyance to their fellow scientists
and a mystery to the general public, and what is not is evident.
There is no doubt about what is not great, no race of men have such
obvious littlenesses. They live in a narrow world so far as their human

intercourse goes; their researches involve infinite attention and an
almost monastic seclusion; and what is left over is not very much. To
witness some queer, shy, misshapen, greyheaded, 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 "neglect of science"
when the angel of the birthday honours passes the Royal Society by, or
to listen to one indefatigable lichenologist commenting on the work of
another indefatigable lichenologist, such things force one to realise the
unfaltering littleness of men.
And withal the reef of Science that these little "scientists" built and are
yet building is so wonderful, so portentous, so full of mysterious
half-shapen promises for the mighty future of man! They do not seem
to realise the things they are doing! No doubt long ago even Mr.
Bensington, 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 his life to such work, as young men do? No, they
must have seen the glory, they must have had the vision, but so near
that it has blinded them. The splendour has blinded them, mercifully, so
that for the rest of their lives they can hold the lights of knowledge in
comfort--that we may see!
And perhaps it accounts for Redwood's touch of preoccupation,
that--there can be no doubt of it now--he among his fellows was
different, he was different inasmuch as something of the vision still
lingered in his eyes.
II.
The Food of the Gods I call it, this substance that Mr. Bensington and
Professor Redwood made between them; and having regard now to
what it has already done and all that it is certainly going to do, there is
surely no exaggeration in the name. So I shall continue to call it
therefore throughout my story. But Mr. Bensington would no more
have called it that in cold blood than he would have gone out from his

flat in Sloane Street clad in regal scarlet and a wreath of laurel. The
phrase was a mere first cry of astonishment from him. He called it the
Food of the Gods, in his enthusiasm and for an hour or so