Oscar deposited his broom in one corner, and drew aside the curtain concealing the recess in which his birds and animals were placed.
The professor entered, and instantly seemed to become entirely unconscious of Oscar's presence, so engrossed was he with what he saw before him. He stopped in front of each bird, and talked to it in an undertone, and finally he began to speak his words aloud, so that Oscar could understand them.
"Ah," said he, "a very fine specimen of the order Rasores, family Tetraonidæ, vulgo partridge; the Tetrao Umbellus of Linnæus, and the Bonasia Umbellus of Bonaparte, which is incorrect. This is a specimen of the order Insessores, family Ampelidæ, genus Bombycilla Carolinensis. Very finely mounted, I should say; much better than some of the specimens we have at the university."
All these hard words were rolled off without the least hesitation, and it was evident that the professor had them at his tongue's end. Oscar listened in genuine amazement, and then seizing a piece of pine board, that happened to be lying near him on the bench, hastily wrote something upon it with a pencil he drew from his pocket, and moved up a little closer to his visitor, so that he could catch every word he said.
"Young man," said the latter, "do you know anything about comparative anatomy?"
"No, sir," replied Oscar, who had never heard this expression before.
"You ought to study it," continued the professor, "for it belongs to your business. If you will give a scientist a single bone, he can build the skeleton of the beast or bird to which that bone belongs, although he may never have seen it. The species may even be extinct. Some of my students once brought me a bone they had found in the woods, and which they thought was the bone of a mastodon of the order Pachydermata; but it proved to belong to one of the order Ruminantia, being the bone of an ox."
Oscar wrote two words more on his board, and waited for the professor to go on; and when he did go on, Oscar heard something for which he was not at all prepared, and which astonished him beyond measure.
"I think you are the person we want," continued the visitor.