The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth | Page 3

at the most
altogether. After that he decided he was being absurd. When he first
thought of the thing he saw, as it were, a vista of enormous
possibilities--literally enormous possibilities; but upon this dazzling
vista, after one stare of amazement, he resolutely shut his eyes, even as
a conscientious "scientist" should. After that, the Food of the Gods
sounded blatant to the pitch of indecency. He was surprised he had used
the expression. Yet for all that something of that clear-eyed moment
hung about him and broke out ever and again....
"Really, you know," he said, rubbing his hands together and laughing
nervously, "it has more than a theoretical interest.
"For example," he confided, bringing his face close to the Professor's
and dropping to an undertone, "it would perhaps, if suitably handled,
sell....
"Precisely," he said, walking away,--"as a Food. Or at least a food
ingredient.
"Assuming of course that it is palatable. A thing we cannot know till
we have prepared it."
He turned upon the hearthrug, and studied the carefully designed slits
upon his cloth shoes.
"Name?" he said, looking up in response to an inquiry. "For my part I
incline to the good old classical allusion. It--it makes Science res--.
Gives it a touch of old-fashioned dignity. I have been thinking ... I don't
know if you will think it absurd of me.... A little fancy is surely
occasionally permissible.... Herakleophorbia. Eh? The nutrition of a
possible Hercules? You know it might ...
"Of course if you think not--"
Redwood reflected with his eyes on the fire and made no objection.

"You think it would do?"
Redwood moved his head gravely.
"It might be Titanophorbia, you know. Food of Titans.... You prefer the
former?
"You're quite sure you don't think it a little too--"
"No."
"Ah! I'm glad."
And so they called it Herakleophorbia throughout their investigations,
and in their report,--the report that was never published, because of the
unexpected developments that upset all their arrangements,--it is
invariably written in that way. There were three kindred substances
prepared before they hit on the one their speculations had foretolds and
these they spoke of as Herakleophorbia I, Herakleophorbia II, and
Herakleophorbia III. It is Herakleophorbia IV. which I--insisting upon
Bensington's original name--call here the Food of the Gods.
III.
The idea was Mr. Bensington's. But as it was suggested to him by one
of Professor Redwood's contributions to the Philosophical Transactions,
he very properly consulted that gentleman before he carried it further.
Besides which it was, as a research, a physiological, quite as much as a
chemical inquiry.
Professor Redwood was one of those scientific men who are addicted to
tracings and curves. You are familiar--if you are at all the sort of reader
I like--with the sort of scientific paper I mean. It is a paper you cannot
make head nor tail of, and at the end come five or six long folded
diagrams that open out and show peculiar zigzag tracings, flashes of
lightning overdone, or sinuous inexplicable things called "smoothed
curves" set up on ordinates and rooting in abscissae--and things like
that. You puzzle over the thing for a long time and end with the

suspicion that not only do you not understand it but that the author does
not understand it either. But really you know many of these scientific
people understand the meaning of their own papers quite well: it is
simply a defect of expression that raises the obstacle between us.
I am inclined to think that Redwood thought in tracings and curves.
And after his monumental work upon Reaction Times (the unscientific
reader is exhorted to stick to it for a little bit longer and everything will
be as clear as daylight) Redwood began to turn out smoothed curves
and sphygmographeries upon Growth, and it was one of his papers
upon Growth that really gave Mr. Bensington his idea.
Redwood, you know, had been measuring growing things of all sorts,
kittens, puppies, sunflowers, mushrooms, bean plants, and (until his
wife put a stop to it) his baby, and he showed that growth went out not
at a regular pace, or, as he put it, so,
[Illustration]
but with bursts and intermissions of this sort.
[Illustration]
and that apparently nothing grew regularly and steadily, and so far as
he could make out nothing could grow regularly and steadily: it was as
if every living thing had just to accumulate force to grow, grew with
vigour only for a time, and then had to wait for a space before it could
go on growing again. And in the muffled and highly technical language
of the really careful "scientist," Redwood suggested that the process of
growth probably demanded the presence of a considerable quantity of
some necessary substance in the blood that was only formed