n
house, and she said that rather than wait on a lot of tadpoles she'd go
as matron to a school; and then he asked her to be reasonable, and she
asked _him_ to be reasonable then and give up all this about tadpoles;
and he said she might respect his ideas, and she said not if they were
smelly she wouldn't, and then he gave way completely and said--in spite
of the classical remarks of Huxley upon the subject--a bad word. Not a
very bad word it was, but bad enough.

And after that she was greatly offended and had to be apologised to, and
the prospect of ever trying the Food of the Gods upon tadpoles in their
flat at any rate vanished completely in the apology.

So Bensington had to consider some other way of carrying out these
experiments in feeding that would be necessary to demonstrate his
discovery, so soon as he had his substance isolated and prepared. For
some days he meditated upon the possibility of boarding out his tadpoles
with some trustworthy person, and then the chance sight of the phrase in
a newspaper turned his thoughts to an Experimental Farm.

And chicks. Directly he thought of it, he thought of it as a poultry
farm. He was suddenly taken with a vision of wildly growing chicks. He
conceived a picture of coops and runs, outsize and still more outsize
coops, and runs progressively larger. Chicks are so accessible, so
easily fed and observed, so much drier to handle and measure, that for
his purpose tadpoles seemed to him now, in comparison with them, quite
wild and uncontrollable beasts. He was quite puzzled to understand why
he had not thought of chicks instead of tadpoles from the beginning.
Among other things it would have saved all this trouble with his cousin
Jane. And when he suggested this to Redwood, Redwood quite agreed with
him.

Redwood said that in working so much upon needlessly small animals he
was convinced experimental physiologists made a great mistake. It is
exactly like making experiments in chemistry with an insufficient
quantity of material; errors of observation and manipulation become
disproportionately large. It was of extreme importance just at present
that scientific men should assert their right to have their material
_big_. That was why he was doing his present series of experiments at
the Bond Street College upon Bull Calves, in spite of a certain amount
of inconvenience to the students and professors of other subjects caused
by their incidental levity in the corridors. But