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As for the others, the unbelievers, the savants pure and simple, they looked on and evinced some interest in certain phenomena, but considerations of courtesy deterred them from entering into discussions which they knew would have been useless. When as men of sense their discomfort became too great, and they felt themselves growing angry, they simply left the room.
"We associate the name of Humboldt with oceans, continents, mountains, volcanoes with towering palms the snow-lipped craters of the Andes the wide deserts with primeval forests and European capitals with wilderness and universities with savages and savants with the lonely rivers of unpeopled wastes with peaks, pampas, steppes, cliffs and crags with the progress of the world with every science known to man and with every star glittering in the immensity of space.
Much, however, could be learned with the aid of Aina from the Martians, now crowded on the land above the palace. The results of these discoveries will in due time appear, fully elaborated in learned and authoratative treatises prepared by these savants' themselves. I shall only call attention to one, which seemed to me very remarkable.
'For what purpose are we come here? said some of them, 'the Directory has transported us. 'Caffarelli, said others, 'is the agent that has been made use of to deceive the General-in-Chief. Many of them, having observed that wherever there were vestiges of antiquity they were carefully searched, vented their spite in invective against the savants, or scientific men, who, they said, had started the idea of she expedition to order to make these searches.
We are not so clever, not we! We are not savants, coxcombs, fops! We are practitioners; we cure people, and we should not dream of operating on any one who is in perfect health. Straighten club-feet! As if one could straighten club-feet! It is as if one wished, for example, to make a hunchback straight!"
While the Roman law and all the savants inspired by it teach that property in its origin is the right of first occupancy sanctioned by law, the modern legists, dissatisfied with this brutal definition, claim that property is based upon LABOR. Immediately they infer that he who no longer labors, but makes another labor in his stead, loses his right to the earnings of the latter.
Ah! how that worthy man did underline the verb "to float!" And it was the truth! All, yes! all these savants had forgotten this fundamental law, that in consequence of its specific lightness the projectile, after having been dragged by its fall to the greatest depths of the ocean, had naturally returned to the surface; and now it was floating tranquilly whichever way the wind carried them.
And to this day I cannot, without a nervous thrill, think how the desire of all the ages, the ideal that has been the loadstar for thousands of philosophers, savants, inventors, prophets, and dreamers, was actually realized upon the earth; and yet of all its fifteen hundred million inhabitants but a single one knew it, possessed it, controlled it and he would not reveal it, but hoarded and used his knowledge for the accomplishment of the craziest design that ever took shape in a human brain.
In the entrance-hall stood the larger figures of the Greco-Buddhist sculptures done, savants know how long since, by forgotten workmen whose hands were feeling, and not unskilfully, for the mysteriously transmitted Grecian touch.
The paradoxes of one generation are the common-places of the next; what the savants of to-day whisper in the ear, the Hyde Park orators of to-morrow will bawl from their platforms.
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