om--I know no better
word--"

"Neither do we," we said.

"That the nuclei move under the energy of such forces, what have we
got?"

"Ha!" we said.

"What have we got? Why, the simplest matter conceivable. The forces
inside our atom--itself, mind you, the function of a circle--mark
that--"

We did.

"Becomes merely a function of pi!"

The Great Scientist paused with a laugh of triumph.

"A function of pi!" we repeated in delight.

"Precisely. Our conception of ultimate matter is reduced to that of an
oblate spheroid described by the revolution of an ellipse on its own
minor axis!"

"Good heavens!" we said. "Merely that."

"Nothing else. And in that case any further calculation becomes a mere
matter of the extraction of a root."

"How simple," we murmured.

"Is it not," said the Professor. "In fact, I am accustomed, in talking
to my class, to give them a very clear idea, by simply taking as our
root F--F being any finite constant--"

He looked at us sharply. We nodded.

"And raising F to the log of infinity. I find they apprehend it very
readily."

"Do they?" we murmured. Ourselves we felt as if the Log of Infinity
carried us to ground higher than what we commonly care to tread on.

"Of course," said the Professor, "the Log of Infinity is an Unknown."

"Of course," we said very gravely. We felt ourselves here in the
presence of something that demanded our reverence.

"But still," continued the Professor almost jauntily, "we can handle the
Unknown just as easily as anything else."

This puzzled us. We kept silent. We thought it wiser to move on to more
general ground. In any case, our notes were now nearly complete.

"These discoveries, then," we said, "are absolutely revolutionary."

"They are," said the Professor.

"You have now, as we understand, got the atom--how shall we put it?--got
it where you want it."

"Not exactly," said the Professor with a sad smile.

"What do you mean?" we asked.

"Unfortunately our analysis, perfect though it is, stops short. We have
no synthesis."

The Professor spoke as in deep sorrow.

"No synthesis," we moaned. We felt it was a cruel blow. But in any case
our notes were now elaborate enough. We felt that our readers could do
without a synthesis. We rose to go.

"Synthetic dynamics," said the Professor, taking us by the coat, "is
only beginning--"

"In that case--" we murmured, disengaging his hand.

"But, wait, wait," he pleaded "wait for anoth