ists get dozens of them when they are
out dredging; but they say nothing about them, and throw them overboard
again, for fear of spoiling their theories. But, you see the
professor was found out, as every one is in due time. A very terrible
old fairy found the professor out; she felt his bumps, and cast his
nativity, and took the lunars of him carefully inside and out; and so
she knew what he would do as well as if she had seen it in a print book,
as they say in the dear old west country; and he did it; and so he was
found out beforehand, as everybody always is; and the old fairy will
find out the naturalists some day, and put them in the _Times_, and then
on whose side will the laugh be?

So the old fairy took him in hand very severely there and then. But she
says she is always most severe with the best people, because there is
most chance of curing them, and therefore they are the patients who pay
her best; for she has to work on the same salary as the Emperor of
China's physicians (it is a pity that all do not), no cure, no pay.

So she took the poor professor in hand: and because he was not content
with things as they are, she filled his head with things as they are
not, to try if he would like them better; and because he did not choose
to believe in a water-baby when he saw it, she made him believe in worse
things than water-babies--in _unicorns_, _fire-drakes_, _manticoras_,
_basilisks_, _amphisbaenas_, _griffins_, _ph[oe]nixes_, _rocs_, _orcs_,
_dog-headed men_, _three-headed dogs_, _three-bodied geryons_, and other
pleasant creatures, which folks think never existed yet, and which folks
hope never will exist, though they know nothing about the matter, and
never will; and these creatures so upset, terrified, flustered,
aggravated, confused, astounded, horrified, and totally flabbergasted
the poor professor that the doctors said that he was out of his wits for
three months; and perhaps they were right, as they are now and then.

So all the doctors in the county were called in to make a report on his
case; and of course every one of them flatly contradicted the other:
else what use is there in being men of science? But at last the majority
agreed on a report in the true medical language, one half bad Latin, the
other half worse Greek, and the rest what might have been English, if
they had only learnt to write it. And this is the beginning thereof--

"_The subanhypaposupernal anastomoses of peritomic diacellurite