The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth | Page 5

begin with; this being what tadpoles are for. And
it was agreed that he should conduct the experiments and not Redwood,
because Redwood's laboratory was occupied with the ballistic
apparatus and animals necessary for an investigation into the Diurnal
Variation in the Butting Frequency of the Young Bull Calf, an
investigation that was yielding curves of an abnormal and very
perplexing sort, and the presence of glass globes of tadpoles was
extremely undesirable while this particular research was in progress.
But when Mr. Bensington conveyed to his cousin Jane something of
what he had in mind, she put a prompt veto upon the importation of any
considerable number of tadpoles, or any such experimental creatures,
into their flat. She had no objection whatever to his use of one of the
rooms of the flat for the purposes of a non-explosive chemistry that, so
far as she was concerned, came to nothing; she let him have a gas
furnace and a sink and a dust-tight cupboard of refuge from the weekly
storm of cleaning she would not forego. And having known people
addicted to drink, she regarded his solicitude for distinction in learned
societies as an excellent substitute for the coarser form of depravity.

But any sort of living things in quantity, "wriggly" as they were bound
to be alive and "smelly" dead, she could not and would not abide. She
said these things were certain to be unhealthy, and Bensington was
notoriously a delicate man--it was nonsense to say he wasn't. And when
Bensington tried to make the enormous importance of this possible
discovery clear, she said that it was all very well, but if she consented
to his making everything nasty and unwholesome in the place (and that
was what it all came to) then she was certain he would be the first to
complain.
And Mr. Bensington went up and down the room, regardless of his
corns, and spoke to her quite firmly and angrily without the slightest
effect. He said that nothing ought to stand in the way of the
Advancement of Science, and she said that the Advancement of
Science was one thing and having a lot of tadpoles in a flat was another;
he said that in Germany it was an ascertained fact that a man with an
idea like his would at once have twenty thousand properly-fitted cubic
feet of laboratory placed at his disposal, and she said she was glad and
always had been glad that she was not a German; he said that it would
make him famous for ever, and she said it was much more likely to
make him ill to have a lot of tadpoles in a flat like theirs; he said he was
master in his own house, and she said that rather than wait on a lot of
tadpoles she'd go as matron to a school; and then he asked her to be
reasonable, and she asked him to be reasonable then and give up all this
about tadpoles; and he said she might respect his ideas, and she said not
if they were smelly she wouldn't, and then he gave way completely and
said--in spite of the classical remarks of Huxley upon the subject--a bad
word. Not a very bad word it was, but bad enough.
And after that she was greatly offended and had to be apologised to,
and the prospect of ever trying the Food of the Gods upon tadpoles in
their flat at any rate vanished completely in the apology.
So Bensington had to consider some other way of carrying out these
experiments in feeding that would be necessary to demonstrate his
discovery, so soon as he had his substance isolated and prepared. For
some days he meditated upon the possibility of boarding out his

tadpoles with some trustworthy person, and then the chance sight of the
phrase in a newspaper turned his thoughts to an Experimental Farm.
And chicks. Directly he thought of it, he thought of it as a poultry farm.
He was suddenly taken with a vision of wildly growing chicks. He
conceived a picture of coops and runs, outsize and still more outsize
coops, and runs progressively larger. Chicks are so accessible, so easily
fed and observed, so much drier to handle and measure, that for his
purpose tadpoles seemed to him now, in comparison with them, quite
wild and uncontrollable beasts. He was quite puzzled to understand
why he had not thought of chicks instead of tadpoles from the
beginning. Among other things it would have saved all this trouble with
his cousin Jane. And when he suggested this to Redwood, Redwood
quite agreed with him.
Redwood said that in working so much upon needlessly small animals
he was convinced experimental physiologists made a great mistake. It
is exactly like