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ple--with a Bodley Booklet a-printing!--of stealing. He has taken remarkable honours at the University--he went through them with a sort of hasty slobber, as though he feared I might interrupt him before he had told me all--and he spoke of taking his D.Sc. as one might speak of taking a cab. And he asked what I was doing--with a sort of comparative accent, and his arm was spread nervously, positively a protecting arm, over the paper that hid the precious idea--his one hopeful idea. "'Poetry,' he said, 'Poetry. And what do you profess to teach in it, Hicks?' "The thing's a Provincial professorling in the very act of budding, and I thank the Lord devoutly that but for the precious gift of indolence I also might have gone this way to D.Sc. and destruction..." A curious little vignette that I am inclined to think caught Filmer in or near the very birth of his discovery. Hicks was wrong in anticipating a provincial professorship for Filmer. Our next glimpse of him is lecturing on "rubber and rubber substitutes," to the Society of Arts--he had become manager to a great plastic-substance manufactory--and at that time, it is now known, he was a member of the Aeronautical Society, albeit he contributed nothing to the discussions of that body, preferring no doubt to mature his great conception without external assistance. And within two years of that paper before the Society of Arts he was hastily taking out a number of patents and proclaiming in various undignified ways the completion of the divergent inquiries which made his flying machine possible. The first definite statement to that effect appeared in a halfpenny evening paper through the agency of a man who lodged in the same house with Filmer. His final haste after his long laborious secret patience seems to have been due to a needless panic, Bootle, the notorious American scientific quack, having made an announcement that Filmer interpreted wrongly as an anticipation of his idea. Now what precisely was Filmer's idea? Really a very simple one. Before his time the pursuit of aeronautics had taken two divergent lines, and had developed on the one hand balloons--large apparatus lighter than air, easy in ascent, and comparatively safe in descent, but floating helplessly before any breeze that took them; and on the other, flying machines that flew only in theory--vast flat structures heavier than air, propelled and kept up by heavy engines and for the most part smashin
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