In fact, the professor exhibited the impatience which the man of one idea feels for the man of another, and had even the personal repulsion which a man with the Oxford manner experiences for one who begins all his sentences with "M'yess!"
From which disjointed self-communings the reader will have already deduced that the professor was an ethnologist, one of that small band of heroes who during the past hundred years have quietly dug out and fitted together the buried past of the human race, pelted all the while by Ignorance and Bigotry as they delved.
The little grey professor had come in for his share of pelting: not very recently, for his science has won her right to exist and speak her mind. Dogma, which would have burned the ethnologist some time back, and more recently did her best to starve him, has of late lifted the boycott. He is now merely glanced at with a pitying shrug and passed over when anything good is going, as "Eminent in his own line, but—peculiar," and forthwith, the good thing goes to a safe man, someone who never did anything, nor ever will. This is Dogma's way of coming round. The sons of the men who pelted us will build our sepulchres, never fear, whilst themselves making a cock-shy of some other poor devil whom their sons will canonise in turn: for the bigots, and the poor, ye have always with you.
So it had come to pass that the professor by dint of giving to fossil-grubbing the forty-five years of life which he might have given to money-grubbing, and spending upon the collection and verification of tiny fragments of unpopular evidence the time which he might have spent more profitably in the delivery of sermons in St Mary's, which would have delighted the stupid by the "safety" of what they didn't see the bottom of, and amused the clever by the preacher's address in skating upon cat-ice, had come to know as much as was known about the Magdalanian Period.
Others worked at River-drift, Thames gravels and the terraces north of Amiens: and other some questioned the Plateaux deposits for eoliths and got but uncertain answers, as to which our professor reserved his judgment, unconvinced, but not wishing to be found sitting in the seat of the scornful at the Last Day. Neoliths he pretended to know nothing about whilst knowing everything that had been written. It was the men of the Madelaine Cave, the giant hunters of Mentone and their artist fellows to whom he had given his life.
Now some studies can be pursued by the fireside, the mathematics of a boomerang, for instance, or why a breakfast egg, if you set it spinning vigorously upon its side, will presently arise and spin upon its end. For the collation of Syriac gospels the neighbourhood of the Bodleian is as good a neighbourhood as any, but our professor, whose fireside was within a stone's-throw of the Bodleian, cared for neither mathematics nor codices, and as regards his own particular study had long since known that to prosecute it as it should be prosecuted entailed days and weeks in clammy dark caverns long miles from anywhere, and subsequent months put in with a series of little sieves and acids and gelatine and what not, cleaning-out and piecing together the uncleanly little bits of brittle rubbish which eventually would constitute a New Fact and take a place in the growing chain of evidence.
"To anybody capable of weighing testimony," muttered the professor, "this flake, which can only have been brought eighty miles up-stream by human agency, is as good evidence of Early Man at this end of the valley as if I had projected myself back a thousand centuries and seen the fellow break his tool and drop it."
He was somewhat out of breath with his climb, moreover the going was none of the best; there was no path, and the slope was clothed with a tall growth of flowering weeds, mountain coltsfoot, and the great purple gentian, dogwood, juniper and aconite. He replaced his hat after wiping his forehead, and, turning, parted the brush to find himself faced by a low bluff, an outcrop of the underlying bedrock, jutting through the rough slope of débris into which the at-one-time precipitous sides of the glen had broken down. The bluff bore a ludicrous resemblance to the countenance of some ancient person asleep and half buried in bedclothes; there aloft was a massive nose and receding rocky forehead, nearer an upper lip overhung a transverse fissure, an open mouth, nearly filled with a tongue of soapy-looking brown stalagmite resting upon a lower jaw of the same material hidden by a growth of Martagon lilies. The professor, unaware of what Fate had in store for him, and, to tell the truth, expecting nothing out of the way, for a man of his years and experiences is past being sanguine, peered through the lush greenery and saw beneath the edge of that lower lip a jumble of small broken stone loosely cemented like ill-compacted concrete into which water has percolated (which was precisely what the material was and what had befallen it).
And, peering thus, a Something caught the professor's eye. Now the Thing, whatever it might turn out to be, could not fly away, nor was its finder a callow novice that he should howk out his trove at sight and, maybe, destroy evidence in so doing, so he made himself a mental rough sketch of its surroundings before disturbing them.