putting back each part in its
proper place. This was troublesome work, especially after breakfast,
and it was not long before they were both asleep, Bouvard with drooping
chin and protruding stomach, and Pecuchet with his hands over his head
and both elbows on the table.

Often at that moment M. Vaucorbeil, having finished his morning rounds,
would open the door.

"Well, comrades, how goes anatomy?"

"Splendidly," they would answer.

Then he would put questions to them, for the pleasure of confusing them.

When they were tired of one organ they went on to another, in this way
taking up and then throwing aside the heart, the stomach, the ear, the
intestines; for the pasteboard manikin bored them to death, despite
their efforts to become interested in him. At last the doctor came on
them suddenly, just as they were nailing him up again in his box.

"Bravo! I expected that."

At their age they could not undertake such studies; and the smile that
accompanied these words wounded them deeply.

What right had he to consider them incapable? Did science belong to this
gentleman, as if he were himself a very superior personage? Then,
accepting his challenge, they went all the way to Bayeux to purchase
books there. What they required was physiology, and a second-hand
bookseller procured for them the treatises of Richerand and Adelon,
celebrated at the period.

All the commonplaces as to ages, sexes, and temperaments appeared to
them of the highest importance. They were much pleased to learn that
there are in the tartar of the teeth three kinds of animalcules, that
the seat of taste is in the tongue, and the sensation of hunger in the
stomach.

In order to grasp its functions better, they regretted that they had not
the faculty of ruminating, as Montegre, M. Gosse, and the brother of
Gerard had; and they masticated slowly, reduced the food to pulp, and
insalivated it, accompanying in thought the alimentary mass passing into
their intestines, and following it with methodical scrupulosity and an
almost religious attention to its final consequences.

In order to produce digestion artificially, they piled up meat in a
bottle, in which was the gastric juice of a duck, and they carried it
under their armpits for a fortnight, without any other result save
making their persons smell unpleasantly. You might have seen them
running along the high-road in wet clothes under a burning sun. This was
for the purpose of determining w