the old man up."

"Anything more about Challenger?"

"Well, I'm a bacteriologist, you know. I live in a
nine-hundred-diameter microscope. I can hardly claim to take serious
notice of anything that I can see with my naked eye. I'm a
frontiersman from the extreme edge of the Knowable, and I feel quite
out of place when I leave my study and come into touch with all you
great, rough, hulking creatures. I'm too detached to talk scandal, and
yet at scientific conversaziones I HAVE heard something of Challenger,
for he is one of those men whom nobody can ignore. He's as clever as
they make 'em--a full-charged battery of force and vitality, but a
quarrelsome, ill-conditioned faddist, and unscrupulous at that. He had
gone the length of faking some photographs over the South American
business."

"You say he is a faddist. What is his particular fad?"

"He has a thousand, but the latest is something about Weissmann and
Evolution. He had a fearful row about it in Vienna, I believe."

"Can't you tell me the point?"

"Not at the moment, but a translation of the proceedings exists. We
have it filed at the office. Would you care to come?"

"It's just what I want. I have to interview the fellow, and I need
some lead up to him. It's really awfully good of you to give me a
lift. I'll go with you now, if it is not too late."

Half an hour later I was seated in the newspaper office with a huge
tome in front of me, which had been opened at the article "Weissmann
versus Darwin," with the sub heading, "Spirited Protest at Vienna.
Lively Proceedings." My scientific education having been somewhat
neglected, I was unable to follow the whole argument, but it was
evident that the English Professor had handled his subject in a very
aggressive fashion, and had thoroughly annoyed his Continental
colleagues. "Protests," "Uproar," and "General appeal to the Chairman"
were three of the first brackets which caught my eye. Most of the
matter might have been written in Chinese for any definite meaning that
it conveyed to my brain.

"I wish you could translate it into English for me," I said,
pathetically, to my help-mate.

"Well, it is a translation."

"Then I'd better try my luck with the original."

"It is certainly rather deep for a layman."

"If I could only get a single good, meaty sentence which seemed to
convey some sort of definite human idea, it would serve my turn. Ah,
yes, this one will do. I seem in a vague wa