"This won't do," said Castleton, with that peculiar look on his face which always appeared when he was about to deflect from the serious to the humorous. "Whilst I should not object to hearing my old friend Peters called a gorilla, I draw the line at gorilla. I should object to the appellation orang-outang, and I should resent with emphasis that of baboon. But gorilla I will accept, for in many ways the gorilla is, or at least once was, the superior of man. Even if we limit the source of our deductions to the skeleton of the animal, the truth of my last assertion is strongly evidenced. In the first place, the gorilla is more sedate and less pettily curious than man; this is proved by his having only three, instead of four, bones in the last division of his spine, giving him a shorter caudal appendage than man's, and proving the animal to be farther from the monkey than are we; then in the second place, the gorilla has thirteen ribs, which would seem to be rational evidence that, whatever the present gorilla may be, his ancestors of by-gone ages were handsomer than man; because in the gorilla's first search for a wife the field of operations was not limited to his own chest."
"That will do very well, doctor; but don't you think you are a little severe on Adam?" I said.
"I have no sympathies with Adam. Not that I ever blamed him for his weakness in the apple incident; but I do blame him for his garrulity, and his paltry cowardice in exposing Eve. Eve was an instinctive agnostic—and she didn't purpose to be anybody's slave. If Adam decided to keep up with the procession, as he at first did decide to do, he had no business to whine over the outcome. I'd wager freely that Eve earned the living after the pair left paradise. Cain took after his mother; and I hazard the opinion that Eve was in sympathy with Cain in the Abel episode—that is, after the tragedy. Eve and Cain had the best of everything all the way through, for they acted in harmony with their feelings; whilst poor old feeble, vacillating Adam tried to use his worthless old brain-box, and the natural consequence ensued. His feelings, which constituted the strongest part of his mind, were always in conflict with his intellect, which was just strong enough to get him into trouble when a pure out-and-out unreasoning animal would have been safe; and he never had enough will properly to correct an error when he did see it."
We laughed over this conceit of Castleton's, and Bainbridge said:
"Speaking of biblical characters, I have thought that Moses would, with even slight literary training, have far surpassed the modern writer of adventure-fiction. His style may be open to adverse criticism, but his originality is beyond question. If he left any material for a purely original story, I fail to detect it. He gave to literature the sea-story, the war-story, and the love-story—stories that hinge on all the human passions, and stories of the supernatural in all its phases. He first presented to a world innocent of fiction-literature the giant and the dwarf; the brave man, the strong man, and the man of supreme fortitude; the honest man, the truthful king, and the woman that knows how to wait for the man she loves; voices in the air, signs in the sky—in short, everything. Even poor old Aesop wasn't in time to grasp a reputation for originality. The modern story-teller may combine, extend, and elaborate; but all opportunity for a display of invention seems to be forever barred."
"By the bye, doctor," said Castleton, evidently impatient at his enforced silence whilst another spoke, "do any of your volcanoes or mountains in Hili-li blow up?"
"No, sir," answered Bainbridge, with dignity.
"Well, if I had been Pym I should have blown those mountains into the Antarctic Ocean," said Castleton. "I understand from the words that I caught this evening as I entered here that your heroine is safe; but if I had been Pym, I should have taken no risks. I should have sent your madman word to return the girl, or take the consequences—the consequences being that I should have blown him and the entire mountain into the mighty deep. 'Sir,' I should have said, 'return the lady, or I will annihilate you.' And so I should have done, if a hair of her head had been harmed.—By the bye, gentlemen, I believe you never heard of my invention for stopping war, did you?" We intimated that we had thus far been deprived of that pleasure. I saw that one of his peculiar outbursts was at hand—one of those apparently serious, though, I thought, intentionally humorous sallies, so puzzling coming from a man of Castleton's intellectual attainments, and the mental primum mobile of which I had already been much interested in trying to determine.
"Well, gentlemen," he continued, "it was about fourteen years ago, during the dark days of The War"—he referred to the great rebellion in the United States, which began in 1861, and which it required the existing government about four years to suppress. "It was during the period when our great President was most worried. I had thought the matter over—as I always do think over vast questions, from the standpoint of true greatness. 'Why not,' I mentally soliloquized, 'why not end this matter at a blow? 'As I drove about through our retired roads and lanes, I gave the subject my very best attention. I thought to myself how the present system of the universe depends upon what we term the luminiferous ether; of the perfect elasticity and inexpansibility of that ether; of what its nature must be. I concluded that no ultimate particle of it—as with matter no atom—is ever added to or removed from the universe. Now, if we could succeed in removing from this inexpansible, universal ocean of ether even the most ultimate portion, there would be a literal vacuum with nothing to fill it, and the equilibrium of the universe would be destroyed. Now, gentlemen, is or is not this supposition logical?"
We admitted our inability to deny its truth.