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was not a very expert manipulator, and for that reason probably he saw
fit to do his work not in the excellently equipped laboratories that
were at his disposal in London, but without consulting any one, and
almost with an air of secrecy, in a rough little garden laboratory at
the Keston establishment. He does not seem to have shown either very
great energy or very great ability in this quest; indeed one gathers he
dropped the inquiry after working at it intermittently for about a
month.
This garden laboratory, in which the work was done, was very roughly
equipped, supplied by a standpipe tap with water, and draining into a
pipe that ran down into a swampy rush-bordered pool under an alder tree
in a secluded corner of the common just outside the garden hedge. The
pipe was cracked, and the residuum of the Food of the Gods escaped
through the crack into a little puddle amidst clumps of rushes, just in
time for the spring awakening.
Everything was astir with life in that scummy little corner. There was
frog spawn adrift, tremulous with tadpoles just bursting their
gelatinous envelopes; there were little pond snails creeping out into
life, and under the green skin of the rush stems the larvae of a big
Water Beetle were struggling out of their egg cases. I doubt if the
reader knows the larva of the beetle called (I know not why) Dytiscus.
It is a jointed, queer-looking thing, very muscular and sudden in its
movements, and given to swimming head downward with its tail out of
water; the length of a man's top thumb joint it is, and more--two
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