"So they have from lock-jaw, and consumption, and malaria, and a thousand other complaints."
"That's no comparison. Death from old age is inevitable and . . ."
"Is it? What about me?"
"But sooner or later . . ." I said bluntly.
"Yes! I expect I shall . . . sooner or later. But the chief thing is that I haven't yet. I might have died of diphtheria nearly fifty years ago; but medical science saved me. I might have died of malaria once—but for quinine. Everyone who has reached my age—or only half of it—has probably been saved at least once in his life. But it's only a probability, George. In the majority of cases one cannot tell for certain. With these glands, however, it is different. I know that I've been rescued from death as surely as when a life buoy is thrown to a drowning man. When the liner sinks in mid-ocean it's the number of floatable commodities that determine the number of the saved. A man who destroyed a life buoy at such a moment would be guilty of murder. And that's precisely the attitude we must adopt towards this gorilla hunt. A gorilla shot dead in the heart of Africa is a man murdered somewhere at home. We must catch them alive. . . ."
"I suppose it's possible," I said. "Otherwise, how did they get our friend Alfred—and the one in the Zoo?"
"Naturally it's been done before, but not on a big enough scale. I very much doubt if more than fifty or sixty of them have been captured alive during the last century. That's much too slow for us. We shall want them . . . in hundreds a month, at least. . . ."
"Sort of round them up, like rebels," I suggested.
"Flippantly put," he answered, dryly, "but substantially correct."
The insight required for such a gigantic undertaking was so utterly beyond me that I simply could not treat the matter seriously.