"Nor I," said Youmans.
"Do you believe he has any theory at all?"
"Not a bit of it. He is a madman, and his belief that he has a theory is simply the form which his delusion takes."
"Exactly so," I said; and so it proved. Severe business troubles had wrecked Mr. Flighty's mind, and it was not long before we heard that he had killed himself in a fit of acute mania.
My story must not end with such a gruesome affair. Out of the many queer people I have known, let me mention one who is associated with pleasant memories of childhood and youth. This man was no charlatan, but a learned naturalist, of solid and genuine scientific attainments, who came to be a little daft in his old age. Dr. Joseph Barratt, whose life extended over three fourths of the present century, was born in England. He was at one time a pupil of Cuvier, and cherished his memory with the idolatrous affection which that wonderful man seems always to have inspired. Dr. Barratt, as a physician practising in Middletown, Connecticut, is one of the earliest figures in my memory,—a quaint and lovable figure. His attainments in botany and comparative anatomy were extensive; he was more or less of a geologist, and well read withal in history and general literature, besides being a fair linguist. Though eminently susceptible of the tender passion, he never married; he was neither a householder nor an autocrat of the breakfast table, but dwelt hermit-like in a queer snuggery over somebody's shop. His working-room was a rare sight; so much confusion has not been seen since this fair world weltered in its primeval chaos. With its cases of mineral and botanical specimens, stuffed birds and skeletons galore; with its beetles and spiders mounted on pins, its brains of divers creatures in jars of alcohol, its weird retorts and crucibles, its microscopes and surgeon's tools, its shelves of mysterious liquids in vials, its slabs of Portland sandstone bearing footprints of Triassic dinosaurs, and near the door a grim pterodactyl keeping guard over all, it might have been the necromancing den of a Sidrophel. Maps and crayon sketches, mingled with femurs and vertebræ, sprawled over tables and sofas and cumbered the chairs, till there was scarcely a place to sit down, while everywhere in direst helter-skelter yawned and toppled the books. And such books! There I first browsed in Geoffroy St. Hilaire and Lamarck and Blainville, and passed enchanted hours with the "Règne Animal." The doctor was a courtly gentleman of the old stripe, and never did he clear a chair for me without an apology, saying that he only awaited a leisure day to put all things in strictest order. Dear soul! that day never came.
Dr. Barratt was of course intensely interested in the Portland quarries, and they furnished the theme of the monomania which overtook him at about his sixtieth year. He accepted with enthusiasm the geological proofs of the antiquity of man in Europe, and presently undertook to reinforce them by proofs of his own gathering in the Connecticut Valley. An initial difficulty confronted him. The red freestone of that region belongs to the Triassic period, the oldest of the secondary series. It was an age of giant reptiles, contemporary with the earliest specimens of mammalian life, and not a likely place in which to look for relics of the highest of mammals. But Dr. Barratt insisted that this freestone is Eocene, thus bringing it into the tertiary series; and while geologists in general were unwilling to admit the existence of man before the Pleistocene period, he boldly carried it back to the Eocene. Thus, by adding a few million years to the antiquity of mankind and subtracting a few million from that of the rocks, he was enabled at once to maintain that he had discovered in the Portland freestone the indisputable remains of an ancient human being with only three fingers, upon whom he bestowed the name of Homo tridactylus. For companions he gave this personage four species of kangaroo, and from that time forth discoveries multiplied.
Such claims, when presented before learned societies with the doctor's quaint enthusiasm, and illustrated by his marvellous crayon sketches, were greeted with shouts of laughter. Among the geologists who chiefly provoked his wrath was the celebrated student of fossil footprints, Dr. Edward Hitchcock. "Why, sir," he would exclaim, "Dr. Hitchcock is a perfect fool, sir! I can teach ten of him, sir!" In spite of all scoffs and rebuffs, the old gentleman moved on to the end serene in his unshakable convictions. A courteous listener was, of course, a rare boon to him; and so, in that little town, it became his habit to confide his new discoveries to me. When I was out walking, if chary of my half hours (as sometimes happened), a long detour would be necessary, to avoid his accustomed haunts; and once, on my return from a journey, I had hardly rung the doorbell when he appeared on the veranda with an essay entitled "An Eocene Picnic," which he hoped to publish in "The Atlantic Monthly," and which he insisted upon reading to me then and there. At one time a very large bone was found in one of the quarries, which was pronounced by Dr. Hitchcock to have belonged to an extinct batrachian; but Dr. Barratt saw in it the bone of a pachyderm. "Why, sir," said he, "it was their principal beast of burden,—as big as a rhinoceros and as gentle as a lamb. The children of Homo tridactylus used to play about his feet, sir, in perfect safety. I call him Mega-ergaton docile, 'the teachable great-worker.' Liddell and Scott give only the masculine, ergates, but for a beast of burden, sir, I prefer the neuter form. A gigantic pachyderm, sir; and Dr. Hitchcock, sir, perfect fool, sir, says it was a bullfrog!"
The mortal remains of this gentle palæontologist rest in the beautiful Indian Hill Cemetery at Middletown, and his gravestone, designed and placed there by my dear friend, the late Charles Browning, is appropriate and noble. For the doctor was after all a sterling man, whose unobtrusive merits were great, while his foibles were not important. The stone is a piece of fossil tree-trunk, brought over from Portland, imbedded in an amorphous block untouched by chisel, save where, on a bit of polished surface, one reads the name and dates, with the simple legend, "The Testimony of the Rocks."
November, 1898.