r, and taking from it my note-book, seated himself, and
began to read through my notes with grave attention, while I stood and
looked shyly over his shoulder. On the page that contained my sketches
of the Sidcup arm, showing the distribution of the snails' eggs on the
bones, he lingered with a faint smile that made me turn hot and red.

"Those sketches look rather footy," I said; "but I had to put something
in my note-book."

"You didn't attach any importance, then, to the facts that they
illustrated?"

"No. The egg-patches were there, so I noted the fact. That's all."

"I congratulate you, Berkeley. There is not one man in twenty who would
have the sense to make a careful note of what he considers an
unimportant or irrelevant fact; and the investigator who notes only
those things that appear significant is perfectly useless. He gives
himself no material for reconsideration. But you don't mean that these
egg-patches and worm-tubes appeared to you to have no significance at
all?"

"Oh, of course, they show the position in which the bones were lying."

"Exactly. The arm was lying, fully extended, with the dorsal side
uppermost. There is nothing remarkable in that. But we also learn from
these egg-patches that the hand had been separated from the arm before
it was thrown into the pond; and there is something very remarkable in
that."

I leaned over his shoulder and gazed at my sketches, amazed at the
rapidity with which he had reconstructed the limb from my rough drawings
of the individual bones.

"I don't quite see how you arrived at it, though," I said.

"Well, look at your drawings. The egg-patches are on the dorsal surface
of the scapula, the humerus, and the bones of the fore-arm. But here you
have shown six of the bones of the hand: two metacarpals, the os magnum,
and three phalanges; and they all have egg-patches on the _palmar_
surface. Therefore the hand was lying palm upwards."

"But the hand may have been pronated."

"If you mean pronated in relation to the arm, that is impossible, for
the position of the egg-patches shows clearly that the bones of the arm
were lying in the position of supination. Thus the dorsal surface of the
arm and the palmar surface of the hand respectively were uppermost,
which is an anatomical impossibility so long as the hand is attached to
the arm."

"But might not the hand have become detached after lying in the pond
some time?"

"No. It could not have been detached un