ng
folded diagrams that open out and show peculiar zigzag tracings, flashes
of lightning overdone, or sinuous inexplicable things called "smoothed
curves" set up on ordinates and rooting in abscissae--and things like
that. You puzzle over the thing for a long time and end with the
suspicion that not only do you not understand it but that the author
does not understand it either. But really you know many of these
scientific people understand the meaning of their own papers quite well:
it is simply a defect of expression that raises the obstacle between us.

I am inclined to think that Redwood thought in tracings and curves. And
after his monumental work upon Reaction Times (the unscientific reader
is exhorted to stick to it for a little bit longer and everything will
be as clear as daylight) Redwood began to turn out smoothed curves and
sphygmographeries upon Growth, and it was one of his papers upon Growth
that really gave Mr. Bensington his idea.

Redwood, you know, had been measuring growing things of all sorts,
kittens, puppies, sunflowers, mushrooms, bean plants, and (until his
wife put a stop to it) his baby, and he showed that growth went out not
at a regular pace, or, as he put it, so,

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but with bursts and intermissions of this sort,

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and that apparently nothing grew regularly and steadily, and so far as
he could make out nothing could grow regularly and steadily: it was as
if every living thing had just to accumulate force to grow, grew with
vigour only for a time, and then had to wait for a space before it could
go on growing again. And in the muffled and highly technical language of
the really careful "scientist," Redwood suggested that the process of
growth probably demanded the presence of a considerable quantity of some
necessary substance in the blood that was only formed very slowly, and
that when this substance was used up by growth, it was only very slowly
replaced, and that meanwhile the organism had to mark time. He compared
his unknown substance to oil in machinery. A growing animal was rather
like an engine, he suggested, that can move a certain distance and must
then be oiled before i