this room had heard the foundations of Medicine shift and
change, the rank heresies of yesterday voiced as the facts of to-day--and
_vice versa_.

Adams, having opened his notebook and sharpened his pencil, sat listening
to the gas sizzling above his head; then he turned for a moment and
glanced at the men behind him: the doctor from Vienna in a broadly braided
frock-coat with satin facings, betraying himself to all men by the end of
the clinical thermometer protruding from his waistcoat pocket; the two
Japanese gentlemen--brown, incurious, and inscrutable--men from another
world, come to look on; the republican from Liberia, and the rest. Then he
turned his head, for the door on the floor of the theatre had opened,
giving entrance to Thenard.

Thenard was a smallish man in a rather shabby frock-coat; his beard was
scant, pointed, and gray-tinged; he had a depressed expression, the
general air of a second-rate tradesman on the verge of bankruptcy; and as
he entered and crossed to the _estrade_ where the lecture table stood and
the glass of water, he shouted some words vehemently and harshly to
Alphonse, the theatre attendant, who, it seemed, had forgotten to place
the box of coloured chalks on the table--the sacred chalks which the
lecturer used for colouring his diagrams on the blackboard.

One instantly took a dislike to this shabby-looking _bourgeois_, with the
harsh, irritable voice, but after awhile, as the lecture went on, one
forgot him. It was not the profundity of the man's knowledge, great though
it was, that impressed one; or the subtlety of his reasoning or the
lucidity of his expression, but his earnestness, his obvious disregard for
everything earthly but Truth.

This was borne in on one by every expression of his face, every gesture of
his body, every word and every tone and inflection of his voice.

This was the twelfth and last lecture of the course. It was on the "Brain
Conceived as a Machine Pure and Simple."

It was a cold and pitiless lecture, striking at the root of poetry and
romance, speaking of religions, not religion, and utterly ignoring the
idea which stands poised like a white-winged Victory over all other
ideas--the Soul.

It was pitiless because it did these things, and it was terrible because
it was spoken by Thenard, for he was just standing there, a little, oldish
man, terribly convincing in his simplicity, absolutely without prejudice,
as ready to acknowledge the soul and its a