dous
quantities of all sorts of knowledge. The very extent of their
vocabulary amazed Thompson. He heard scientific and historical
authorities quoted and disputed, listened to arguments waged on every
sort of ground--from biological complexities which he could not
understand to agricultural statistics which he understood still less. A
lot of it perplexed and irritated him, because the terminology was over
his head. And the fact that he could not follow these men in full
intellectual flight spurred him to find the truth or falsity of those
things for himself. He got an inkling of the economic problems that
afflict society. He found himself assenting offhand to the reasonable
theorem that a man who produced wealth was entitled to what he
produced. He listened to many a wordy debate in which the theory of
evolution was opposed to the seven-day creation. There was thus revived
in him some of those troublesome perplexities which Sam and Sophie Carr
had first aroused.

In the end, lacking profitable employment and growing dubious of
obtaining it during the slack industrial season which then hovered over
California, he turned to the serried shelves of the city library. Once
started along this road he became an habitue, spending in a particular
chair at a certain table anywhere from three to six hours a day, deep in
a book, not to be deterred therefrom by the usual series of mental
shocks which a man, full-fed all his life on conventions and dogmas and
superficial thinking, gets when he first goes seriously and critically
into the fields of scientific conclusions.

He was seated at a reading table one afternoon, nursing his chin in one
hand, deep in a volume of Huxley's "Lectures and Essays" which was
making a profound impression upon him through its twin merits of simple,
concise language and breadth of vision. There was in it a rational
explanation of certain elementary processes which to Thompson had never
been accounted for save by means of the supernatural, the mysterious,
the inexplicable. Huxley was merely sharpening a function of his mind
which had been dormant until he ran amuck among the books. He began to
perceive order in the universe and all that it contained, that natural
phenomena could be interpreted by a study of nature, that there was
something more than a name in geology. And he was so immersed in what
he read, in the printed page and the inevitable speculations that arose
in his mind as he conned it, that