edulity--the sure brand of a generation of fools. When great facts
are laid before you, you have not the intuition, the imagination which
would help you to understand them. You can only throw mud at the men
who have risked their lives to open new fields to science. You
persecute the prophets! Galileo! Darwin, and I----" (Prolonged
cheering and complete interruption.)

All this is from my hurried notes taken at the time, which give little
notion of the absolute chaos to which the assembly had by this time
been reduced. So terrific was the uproar that several ladies had
already beaten a hurried retreat. Grave and reverend seniors seemed to
have caught the prevailing spirit as badly as the students, and I saw
white-bearded men rising and shaking their fists at the obdurate
Professor. The whole great audience seethed and simmered like a
boiling pot. The Professor took a step forward and raised both his
hands. There was something so big and arresting and virile in the man
that the clatter and shouting died gradually away before his commanding
gesture and his masterful eyes. He seemed to have a definite message.
They hushed to hear it.

"I will not detain you," he said. "It is not worth it. Truth is
truth, and the noise of a number of foolish young men--and, I fear I
must add, of their equally foolish seniors--cannot affect the matter.
I claim that I have opened a new field of science. You dispute it."
(Cheers.) "Then I put you to the test. Will you accredit one or more
of your own number to go out as your representatives and test my
statement in your name?"

Mr. Summerlee, the veteran Professor of Comparative Anatomy, rose among
the audience, a tall, thin, bitter man, with the withered aspect of a
theologian. He wished, he said, to ask Professor Challenger whether
the results to which he had alluded in his remarks had been obtained
during a journey to the headwaters of the Amazon made by him two years
before.

Professor Challenger answered that they had.

Mr. Summerlee desired to know how it was that Professor Challenger
claimed to have made discoveries in those regions which had been
overlooked by Wallace, Bates, and other previous explorers of
established scientific repute.

Professor Challenger answered that Mr. Summerlee appeared to be
confusing the Amazon with the Thames; that it was in reality a somewhat
larger river; that Mr. Summerlee might be interested to know that with
the Orinoco, which c