w out his chest, passed his hand caressingly down his
beard, and looked with drooping eyelids and supercilious eyes at the
crowded hall before him. The uproar of his advent had not yet died
away when Professor Ronald Murray, the chairman, and Mr. Waldron, the
lecturer, threaded their way to the front, and the proceedings began.

Professor Murray will, I am sure, excuse me if I say that he has the
common fault of most Englishmen of being inaudible. Why on earth
people who have something to say which is worth hearing should not take
the slight trouble to learn how to make it heard is one of the strange
mysteries of modern life. Their methods are as reasonable as to try to
pour some precious stuff from the spring to the reservoir through a
non-conducting pipe, which could by the least effort be opened.
Professor Murray made several profound remarks to his white tie and to
the water-carafe upon the table, with a humorous, twinkling aside to
the silver candlestick upon his right. Then he sat down, and Mr.
Waldron, the famous popular lecturer, rose amid a general murmur of
applause. He was a stern, gaunt man, with a harsh voice, and an
aggressive manner, but he had the merit of knowing how to assimilate
the ideas of other men, and to pass them on in a way which was
intelligible and even interesting to the lay public, with a happy knack
of being funny about the most unlikely objects, so that the precession
of the Equinox or the formation of a vertebrate became a highly
humorous process as treated by him.

It was a bird's-eye view of creation, as interpreted by science, which,
in language always clear and sometimes picturesque, he unfolded before
us. He told us of the globe, a huge mass of flaming gas, flaring
through the heavens. Then he pictured the solidification, the cooling,
the wrinkling which formed the mountains, the steam which turned to
water, the slow preparation of the stage upon which was to be played
the inexplicable drama of life. On the origin of life itself he was
discreetly vague. That the germs of it could hardly have survived the
original roasting was, he declared, fairly certain. Therefore it had
come later. Had it built itself out of the cooling, inorganic elements
of the globe? Very likely. Had the germs of it arrived from outside
upon a meteor? It was hardly conceivable. On the whole, the wisest
man was the least dogmatic upon the point. We could not--or at least
we had not succeeded up