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They made the division in the garden, before the ambulance, and when they had concluded their financial business they entered, having recognized on the straw near the entrance the drummer-boy of their company, Bastian, a fat, good-natured little fellow, who had had the ill-luck to receive a spent ball in the groin about five o'clock the day before, when the battle was ended.
They drifted on in personal chat until the sunlight came in parallel lines between the leaves. "Where is Caspar?" he said at last, reluctantly. "It's too late to get back to the Britannia for dinner." He jumped up as if conscious of a fault. "Oh, we'll dine here. Caspar has found some one at the stablimento and has gone off. Ask Bastian there must be some place where we can get enough to eat."
We endeavored to treat our reviewer fairly, as he had handsomely accorded to us the credit of "searching the fields of natural science, lance in hand, to deal hard thrusts at impious skeptics, materialists, and evolutionists of which Mr. Darwin and Mr. Bastian fare the most severely."
Is our scientific technology so destitute of definitional accuracy that they cannot use half a dozen scientific terms without committing half that number of down-right scientific blunders? "New-born specks of living matter" is language that a vitalist might possibly use by sheer inadvertence; but no avowed materialist, like Professor Bastian, should trip in this definitional way.
Professor J. A. Thomson also warns us that our experience is very limited, and, for all we know, protoplasm may be forming naturally in our own time. Mr. Butler Burke has, under the action of radium, caused the birth of certain minute specks which strangely imitate the behaviour of bacteria. Dr. Bastian has maintained for years that he has produced living things from non-living matter.
He had been working hard ever since nine o'clock in the morning; but now nobody could have looked more superlatively lazy than Bastian Cautley as he stretched himself on two armchairs in an attitude of reckless ease. The room was double-walled with book-shelves, and but for the far away underground humming of a happy maidservant the house was soundless.
The next minute a light went up in that obscure and prophetic background of her brain; and she saw Rhoda Vivian and Bastian Cautley coming towards her, greeting her, with their kind faces shining. She rose, turned from them, and went slowly home. It was the last rent in the veil of illusion that Rhoda had spun so well. Up till then Miss Quincey had seen only half the truth.
In the hypotheses with which scientific men are occupied, testimony is always accessible; and if we do not find any, the presumption is raised that there is none. When Dr. Bastian tells us that he has found living organisms to be generated in sealed flasks from which all living germs had been excluded, we demand the evidence for his assertion.
Were they really, as Bastian Cautley put it, so engrossed in producing a new type that they had lost sight of the individual? Was the system so far in accordance with Nature that it was careless of the single life? Which was the only life open to most of them, poor things. And she had blundered more grossly than the system itself.
Then yielding to a kindly impulse, he threw some coins, never stopping to count them, into the poor hands that were already cold. "Don't forget me! don't forget me!" Bastian fell backward on his straw. For a long time he groped with stiffening fingers for the elusive gold, which seemed to avoid him. And thus he died.
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