yal Society and
a former president of the Chemical Society, and Professor Redwood was
Professor of Physiology in the Bond Street College of the London
University, and he had been grossly libelled by the anti-vivisectionists
time after time. And they had led lives of academic distinction from
their very earliest youth.

They were of course quite undistinguished looking men, as indeed all
true Scientists are. There is more personal distinction about the
mildest-mannered actor alive than there is about the entire Royal
Society. Mr. Bensington was short and very, very bald, and he stooped
slightly; he wore gold-rimmed spectacles and cloth boots that were
abundantly cut open because of his numerous corns, and Professor Redwood
was entirely ordinary in his appearance. Until they happened upon the
Food of the Gods (as I must insist upon calling it) they led lives of
such eminent and studious obscurity that it is hard to find anything
whatever to tell the reader about them.

Mr. Bensington won his spurs (if one may use such an expression of a
gentleman in boots of slashed cloth) by his splendid researches upon the
More Toxic Alkaloids, and Professor Redwood rose to eminence--I do not
clearly remember how he rose to eminence! I know he was very eminent,
and that's all. Things of this sort grow. I fancy it was a voluminous
work on Reaction Times with numerous plates of sphygmograph tracings (I
write subject to correction) and an admirable new terminology, that did
the thing for him.

The general public saw little or nothing of either of these gentlemen.
Sometimes at places like the Royal Institution and the Society of Arts
it did in a sort of way see Mr. Bensington, or at least his blushing
baldness and something of his collar and coat, and hear fragments of a
lecture or paper that he imagined himself to be reading audibly; and
once I remember--one midday in the vanished past--when the British
Association was at Dover, coming on Section C or D, or some such letter,
which had taken up its quarters in a public-house, and following two,
serious-looking ladies with paper parcels, out of mere curiosity,
through a door labelled "Billiards" and "Pool" into a scandalous
darkness, broken only by a magic-lantern circle of Redwood's tracings.

I watched the lantern slides come and go, and listened to a voice (I
forget what it was saying) which I believe was the voice of Professor
Redwood, and there was a sizzling from the lantern and an