other sound
that kept me there, still out of curiosity, until the lights were
unexpectedly turned up. And then I perceived that this sound was the
sound of the munching of buns and sandwiches and things that the
assembled British Associates had come there to eat under cover of the
magic-lantern darkness.

And Redwood I remember went on talking all the time the lights were up
and dabbing at the place where his diagram ought to have been visible on
the screen--and so it was again so soon as the darkness was restored. I
remember him then as a most ordinary, slightly nervous-looking dark man,
with an air of being preoccupied with something else, and doing what he
was doing just then under an unaccountable sense of duty.

I heard Bensington also once--in the old days--at an educational
conference in Bloomsbury. Like most eminent chemists and botanists, Mr.
Bensington was very authoritative upon teaching--though I am certain he
would have been scared out of his wits by an average Board School class
in half-an-hour--and so far as I can remember now, he was propounding an
improvement of Professor Armstrong's Heuristic method, whereby at the
cost of three or four hundred pounds' worth of apparatus, a total
neglect of all other studies and the undivided attention of a teacher of
exceptional gifts, an average child might with a peculiar sort of thumby
thoroughness learn in the course of ten or twelve years almost as much
chemistry as one could get in one of those objectionable shilling
text-books that were then so common....

Quite ordinary persons you perceive, both of them, outside their
science. Or if anything on the unpractical side of ordinary. And that
you will find is the case with "scientists" as a class all the world
over. What there is great of them is an annoyance to their fellow
scientists and a mystery to the general public, and what is not is
evident.

There is no doubt about what is not great, no race of men have such
obvious littlenesses. They live in a narrow world so far as their human
intercourse goes; their researches involve infinite attention and an
almost monastic seclusion; and what is left over is not very much. To
witness some queer, shy, misshapen, grey-headed, self-important, little
discoverer of great discoveries, ridiculously adorned with the wide
ribbon of some order of chivalry and holding a reception of his
fellow-men, or to read the anguish of _Nature_ at the "neglect of
science" when the ang