The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells
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H.G. Wells >> The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth
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17 [Illustration: He sat down in a garden, with his back to a house that
overlooked all London.]
THE FOOD OF THE GODS AND HOW IT CAME TO EARTH
H.G. WELLS
[Illustration]
CONTENTS.
BOOK I.
THE DAWN OF THE FOOD.
I. THE DISCOVERY OF THE FOOD
II. THE EXPERIMENTAL FARM
III. THE GIANT RATS
IV. THE GIANT CHILDREN
V. THE MINIMIFICENCE OF MR. BENSINGTON
BOOK II.
THE FOOD IN THE VILLAGE.
I. THE COMING OF THE FOOD
II. THE BRAT GIGANTIC
BOOK III.
THE HARVEST OF THE FOOD.
I. THE ALTERED WORLD
II. THE GIANT LOVERS
III. YOUNG CADDLES IN LONDON
IV. REDWOOD'S TWO DAYS
V. THE GIANT LEAGUER
BOOK I.
THE DAWN OF THE FOOD.
THE FOOD OF THE GODS.
* * * * *
CHAPTER THE FIRST.
THE DISCOVERY OF THE FOOD.
I.
In the middle years of the nineteenth century there first became
abundant in this strange world of ours a class of men, men tending for
the most part to become elderly, who are called, and who are very
properly called, but who dislike extremely to be called--"Scientists."
They dislike that word so much that from the columns of _Nature_, which
was from the first their distinctive and characteristic paper, it is as
carefully excluded as if it were--that other word which is the basis of
all really bad language in this country. But the Great Public and its
Press know better, and "Scientists" they are, and when they emerge to
any sort of publicity, "distinguished scientists" and "eminent
scientists" and "well-known scientists" is the very least we call them.
Certainly both Mr. Bensington and Professor Redwood quite merited any of
these terms long before they came upon the marvellous discovery of which
this story tells. Mr. Bensington was a Fellow of the Royal 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 another 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, greyheaded, 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 angel of the birthday honours passes the Royal Society
by, or to listen to one indefatigable lichenologist commenting on the
work of another indefatigable lichenologist, such things force one to
realise the unfaltering littleness of men.
And withal the reef of Science that these little "scientists" built and
are yet building is so wonderful, so portentous, so full of mysterious
half-shapen promises for the mighty future of man! They do not seem to
realise the things they are doing! No doubt long ago even Mr.
Bensington, when he chose this calling, when he consecrated his life to
the alkaloids and their kindred compounds, had some inkling of the
vision,--more than an inkling. Without some such inspiration, for such
glories and positions only as a "scientist" may expect, what young man
would have given his life to such work, as young men do? No, they _must_
have seen the glory, they must have had the vision, but so near that it
has blinded them. The splendour has blinded them, mercifully, so that
for the rest of their lives they can hold the lights of knowledge in
comfort--that we may see!
And perhaps it accounts for Redwood's touch of preoccupation,
that--there can be no doubt of it now--he among his fellows was
different, he was different inasmuch as something of the vision still
lingered in his eyes.
II.
The Food of the Gods I call it, this substance that Mr. Bensington and
Professor Redwood made between them; and having regard now to what it
has already done and all that it is certainly going to do, there is
surely no exaggeration in the name. So I shall continue to call it
therefore throughout my story. But Mr. Bensington would no more have
called it that in cold blood than he would have gone out from his flat
in Sloane Street clad in regal scarlet and a wreath of laurel. The
phrase was a mere first cry of astonishment from him. He called it the
Food of the Gods, in his enthusiasm and for an hour or so 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 very slowly, and
that when this substance was used up by growth, it was only very slowly
replaced, and that meanwhile the organism had to mark time. He compared
his unknown substance to oil in machinery. A growing animal was rather
like an engine, he suggested, that can move a certain distance and must
then be oiled before it can run again. ("But why shouldn't one oil the
engine from without?" said Mr. Bensington, when he read the paper.) And
all this, said Redwood, with the delightful nervous inconsecutiveness of
his class, might very probably be found to throw a light upon the
mystery of certain of the ductless glands. As though they had anything
to do with it at all!
In a subsequent communication Redwood went further. He gave a perfect
Brock's benefit of diagrams--exactly like rocket trajectories they were;
and the gist of it--so far as it had any gist--was that the blood of
puppies and kittens and the sap of sunflowers and the juice of mushrooms
in what he called the "growing phase" differed in the proportion of
certain elements from their blood and sap on the days when they were not
particularly growing.
And when Mr. Bensington, after holding the diagrams sideways and upside
down, began to see what this difference was, a great amazement came upon
him. Because, you see, the difference might probably be due to the
presence of just the very substance he had recently been trying to
isolate in his researches upon such alkaloids as are most stimulating to
the nervous system. He put down Redwood's paper on the patent
reading-desk that swung inconveniently from his arm-chair, took off his
gold-rimmed spectacles, breathed on them and wiped them very carefully.
"By Jove!" said Mr. Bensington.
Then replacing his spectacles again he turned to the patent
reading-desk, which immediately, as his elbow came against its arm, gave
a coquettish squeak and deposited the paper, with all its diagrams in a
dispersed and crumpled state, on the floor. "By Jove!" said Mr.
Bensington, straining his stomach over the armchair with a patient
disregard of the habits of this convenience, and then, finding the
pamphlet still out of reach, he went down on all fours in pursuit. It
was on the floor that the idea of calling it the Food of the Gods came
to him....
For you see, if he was right and Redwood was right, then by injecting or
administering this new substance of his in food, he would do away with
the "resting phase," and instead of growth going on in this fashion,
[Illustration] it would (if you follow me) go thus--
[Illustration]
IV.
The night after his conversation with Redwood Mr. Bensington could
scarcely sleep a wink. He did seem once to get into a sort of doze, but
it was only for a moment, and then he dreamt he had dug a deep hole into
the earth and poured in tons and tons of the Food of the Gods, and the
earth was swelling and swelling, and all the boundaries of the countries
were bursting, and the Royal Geographical Society was all at work like
one great guild of tailors letting out the equator....
That of course was a ridiculous dream, but it shows the state of mental
excitement into which Mr. Bensington got and the real value he attached
to his idea, much better than any of the things he said or did when he
was awake and on his guard. Or I should not have mentioned it, because
as a general rule I do not think it is at all interesting for people to
tell each other about their dreams.
By a singular coincidence Redwood also had a dream that night, and his
dream was this:--
[Illustration] It was a diagram done in fire upon a long scroll of the
abyss. And he (Redwood) was standing on a planet before a sort of black
platform lecturing about the new sort of growth that was now possible,
to the More than Royal Institution of Primordial Forces--forces which
had always previously, even in the growth of races, empires, planetary
systems, and worlds, gone so:--
[Illustration]
And even in some cases so:--
[Illustration]
And he was explaining to them quite lucidly and convincingly that these
slow, these even retrogressive methods would be very speedily quite put
out of fashion by his discovery.
Ridiculous of course! But that too shows--
That either dream is to be regarded as in any way significant or
prophetic beyond what I have categorically said, I do not for one moment
suggest.
CHAPTER THE SECOND.
THE EXPERIMENTAL FARM.
I.
Mr. Bensington proposed originally to try this stuff, so soon as he was
really able to prepare it, upon tadpoles. One always does try this sort
of thing upon tadpoles to begin with; this being what tadpoles are for.
And it was agreed that he should conduct the experiments and not
Redwood, because Redwood's laboratory was occupied with the ballistic
apparatus and animals necessary for an investigation into the Diurnal
Variation in the Butting Frequency of the Young Bull Calf, an
investigation that was yielding curves of an abnormal and very
perplexing sort, and the presence of glass globes of tadpoles was
extremely undesirable while this particular research was in progress.
But when Mr. Bensington conveyed to his cousin Jane something of what he
had in mind, she put a prompt veto upon the importation of any
considerable number of tadpoles, or any such experimental creatures,
into their flat. She had no objection whatever to his use of one of the
rooms of the flat for the purposes of a non-explosive chemistry that, so
far as she was concerned, came to nothing; she let him have a gas
furnace and a sink and a dust-tight cupboard of refuge from the weekly
storm of cleaning she would not forego. And having known people addicted
to drink, she regarded his solicitude for distinction in learned
societies as an excellent substitute for the coarser form of depravity.
But any sort of living things in quantity, "wriggly" as they were bound
to be alive and "smelly" dead, she could not and would not abide. She
said these things were certain to be unhealthy, and Bensington was
notoriously a delicate man--it was nonsense to say he wasn't. And when
Bensington tried to make the enormous importance of this possible
discovery clear, she said that it was all very well, but if she
consented to his making everything nasty and unwholesome in the place
(and that was what it all came to) then she was certain he would be the
first to complain.
And Mr. Bensington went up and down the room, regardless of his corns,
and spoke to her quite firmly and angrily without the slightest effect.
He said that nothing ought to stand in the way of the Advancement of
Science, and she said that the Advancement of Science was one thing and
having a lot of tadpoles in a flat was another; he said that in Germany
it was an ascertained fact that a man with an idea like his would at
once have twenty thousand properly-fitted cubic feet of laboratory
placed at his disposal, and she said she was glad and always had been
glad that she was not a German; he said that it would make him famous
for ever, and she said it was much more likely to make him ill to have a
lot of tadpoles in a flat like theirs; he said he was master in his own
house, and she said that rather than wait on a lot of tadpoles she'd go
as matron to a school; and then he asked her to be reasonable, and she
asked _him_ to be reasonable then and give up all this about tadpoles;
and he said she might respect his ideas, and she said not if they were
smelly she wouldn't, and then he gave way completely and said--in spite
of the classical remarks of Huxley upon the subject--a bad word. Not a
very bad word it was, but bad enough.
And after that she was greatly offended and had to be apologised to, and
the prospect of ever trying the Food of the Gods upon tadpoles in their
flat at any rate vanished completely in the apology.
So Bensington had to consider some other way of carrying out these
experiments in feeding that would be necessary to demonstrate his
discovery, so soon as he had his substance isolated and prepared. For
some days he meditated upon the possibility of boarding out his tadpoles
with some trustworthy person, and then the chance sight of the phrase in
a newspaper turned his thoughts to an Experimental Farm.
And chicks. Directly he thought of it, he thought of it as a poultry
farm. He was suddenly taken with a vision of wildly growing chicks. He
conceived a picture of coops and runs, outsize and still more outsize
coops, and runs progressively larger. Chicks are so accessible, so
easily fed and observed, so much drier to handle and measure, that for
his purpose tadpoles seemed to him now, in comparison with them, quite
wild and uncontrollable beasts. He was quite puzzled to understand why
he had not thought of chicks instead of tadpoles from the beginning.
Among other things it would have saved all this trouble with his cousin
Jane. And when he suggested this to Redwood, Redwood quite agreed with
him.
Redwood said that in working so much upon needlessly small animals he
was convinced experimental physiologists made a great mistake. It is
exactly like making experiments in chemistry with an insufficient
quantity of material; errors of observation and manipulation become
disproportionately large. It was of extreme importance just at present
that scientific men should assert their right to have their material
_big_. That was why he was doing his present series of experiments at
the Bond Street College upon Bull Calves, in spite of a certain amount
of inconvenience to the students and professors of other subjects caused
by their incidental levity in the corridors. But the curves he was
getting were quite exceptionally interesting, and would, when published,
amply justify his choice. For his own part, were it not for the
inadequate endowment of science in this country, he would never, if he
could avoid it, work on anything smaller than a whale. But a Public
Vivarium on a sufficient scale to render this possible was, he feared,
at present, in this country at any rate, a Utopian demand. In
Germany--Etc.
As Redwood's Bull calves needed his daily attention, the selection and
equipment of the Experimental Farm fell largely on Bensington. The
entire cost also, was, it was understood, to be defrayed by Bensington,
at least until a grant could be obtained. Accordingly he alternated his
work in the laboratory of his flat with farm hunting up and down the
lines that run southward out of London, and his peering spectacles, his
simple baldness, and his lacerated cloth shoes filled the owners of
numerous undesirable properties with vain hopes. And he advertised in
several daily papers and _Nature_ for a responsible couple (married),
punctual, active, and used to poultry, to take entire charge of an
Experimental Farm of three acres.
He found the place he seemed in need of at Hickleybrow, near Urshot, in
Kent. It was a little queer isolated place, in a dell surrounded by old
pine woods that were black and forbidding at night. A humped shoulder of
down cut it off from the sunset, and a gaunt well with a shattered
penthouse dwarfed the dwelling. The little house was creeperless,
several windows were broken, and the cart shed had a black shadow at
midday. It was a mile and a half from the end house of the village, and
its loneliness was very doubtfully relieved by an ambiguous family of
echoes.
The place impressed Bensington as being eminently adapted to the
requirements of scientific research. He walked over the premises
sketching out coops and runs with a sweeping arm, and he found the
kitchen capable of accommodating a series of incubators and foster
mothers with the very minimum of alteration. He took the place there and
then; on his way back to London he stopped at Dunton Green and closed
with an eligible couple that had answered his advertisements, and that
same evening he succeeded in isolating a sufficient quantity of
Herakleophorbia I. to more than justify these engagements.
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