ver the kitchen, communicating with the doctor's
own room by a little old powder-closet with two doors, and the smell was
indescribable. Ranks of cages and boxes rose almost to the ceiling, and
in the middle of the room was a large business-like looking wooden
kitchen-table with various appliances on it. I saw the doctor's room
also--terribly shabby, but undoubtedly a place of activity. There were
piles of books and unbound magazines standing about in corners, with
more on the table, as well as a heap of note-books. An array of glass
tubes and vary-colored bottles stood below the window, with a
microscope, and small wooden boxes on one side. And there was, besides,
something which I think he called an "incubator"--a metal affair,
standing on four slender legs; a number of glass tubes emerged from
this, each carefully stoppered with cotton wool, and a thermometer
thrust itself up in one corner.

A really high degree of proficiency in any particular subject invariably
leads to atrophy in other directions. A man who eats and breathes and
dreams Toxins, for instance, who lives so much in Toxins that he
corresponds almost daily with learned and unintelligible Germans; who
knows so much about Toxins that when he enters, with shabby trousers and
a small hand-bag, into the room of a polished specialist in Harley
Street, he sees as in a dream the specialist rise and bow before
him--who, when he can be persuaded to contribute a short and highly
technical article to a medical magazine, receives a check for
twenty-five guineas by return of post--a man of this kind is peculiarly
open to the danger of thinking that anything which cannot be expressed
in terms of Toxin is negligible nonsense. It is the characteristic
danger of every specialist in every branch of knowledge; even
theologians are not wholly immune.

It was so in the case of Dr. Whitty (I forget all the initials that
should follow his name). He had never been married, he never took any
exercise; occasionally, when a frog's temperature approached a crisis,
he slept in his clothes, and forgot to change them in the morning. And
he was the despair of the zealous vicar. He was perfectly convinced
that, since the force that underlay the production of Toxins could
accomplish so much, it could surely accomplish everything. He could
reduce his roses, his own complexion, the grass on his garden-paths, the
condition of his snakes', and frogs' skins, and the texture of his
kitchen-t