Bensington's original name--call here the Food of the Gods.

III.

The idea was Mr. Bensington's. But as it was suggested to him by one of

Professor Redwood's contributions to the Philosophical Transactions, he

very properly consulted that gentleman before he carried it further.

Besides which it was, as a research, a physiological, quite as much as a

chemical inquiry.

Professor Redwood was one of those scientific men who are addicted to

tracings and curves. You are familiar--if you are at all the sort of

reader I like--with the sort of scientific paper I mean. It is a paper

you cannot make head nor tail of, and at the end come five or six long

folded diagrams that open out and show peculiar zigzag tracings, flashes

of lightning overdone, or sinuous inexplicable things called "smoothed

curves" set up on ordinates and rooting in abscissae--and things like

that. You puzzle over the thing for a long time and end with the

suspicion that not only do you not understand it but that the author

does not understand it either. But really you know many of these

scientific people understand the meaning of their own papers quite well:

it is simply a defect of expression that raises the obstacle between us.

I am inclined to think that Redwood thought in tracings and curves. And

after his monumental work upon Reaction Times (the unscientific reader

The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth