Doctor Palermo uttered a few words in a foreign tongue. The servant bowed. He removed the glass bowl with his white gloved hands, and carried it into a smaller room that adjoined the laboratory.
“Hassan is my assistant,” explained the physician. “He is an Arab who does not understand a word of English. More than that, he has lost the use of his tongue and cannot speak.”
“That must be a disadvantage,” observed Burke.
“Not at all,” returned Palermo. “In my studies of the human mind, I have noted that the loss of one faculty invariably develops the others.
“A deaf man uses his eyes better than the rest of us. A blind man has a wonderfully keen sense of touch.
Those who cannot speak become wise because they are silent.
“Hassan is faithful, willing, and — necessarily — discreet. Come.”
HE took the newspaperman to a corner of the laboratory, and showed him a row of glass jars, each containing a mass of white substance. He brought down one of the jars, and opened the top.
“A human brain,” he said. “A human brain, with its furrowed surface. A brain that once had ideas — that once created thoughts— now nothing but a mass of idle mechanism.
“This brain”—he set the jar upon a table—”may have caused all types of impulses; but now one could not identify it from another.