ntinual thought, and always employed in gazing into the bottomless
abyss of Motion. Commonplace minds accuse these lofty intellects of
madness; they form a misinterpreted race apart that lives in a wonderful
carelessness of luxuries or other people's notions. They will spend
whole days at a stretch, smoking a cigar that has gone out, and enter
a drawing-room with the buttons on their garments not in every case
formally wedded to the button-holes. Some day or other, after a long
time spent in measuring space, or in accumulating Xs under Aa-Gg, they
succeed in analyzing some natural law, and resolve it into its elemental
principles, and all on a sudden the crowd gapes at a new machine; or it
is a handcart perhaps that overwhelms us with astonishment by the apt
simplicity of its construction. The modest man of science smiles at
his admirers, and remarks, "What is that invention of mine? Nothing
whatever. Man cannot create a force; he can but direct it; and science
consists in learning from nature."

The mechanician was standing bolt upright, planted on both feet, like
some victim dropped straight from the gibbet, when Raphael broke in upon
him. He was intently watching an agate ball that rolled over a sun-dial,
and awaited its final settlement. The worthy man had received neither
pension nor decoration; he had not known how to make the right use of
his ability for calculation. He was happy in his life spent on the watch
for a discovery; he had no thought either of reputation, of the outer
world, nor even of himself, and led the life of science for the sake of
science.

"It is inexplicable," he exclaimed. "Ah, your servant, sir," he went on,
becoming aware of Raphael's existence. "How is your mother? You must go
and see my wife."

"And I also could have lived thus," thought Raphael, as he recalled the
learned man from his meditations by asking of him how to produce any
effect on the talisman, which he placed before him.

"Although my credulity must amuse you, sir," so the Marquis ended, "I
will conceal nothing from you. That skin seems to me to be endowed with
an insuperable power of resistance."

"People of fashion, sir, always treat science rather superciliously,"
said Planchette. "They all talk to us pretty much as the _incroyable_
did when he brought some ladies to see Lalande just after an eclipse,
and remarked, 'Be so good as to begin it over again!' What effect do you
want to produce? The object of the science o