"And did he do it?"
"That's what he did, Bill."
"And," I asked with growing curiosity, "when he had slept through the twenty-four hours? Then what?"
"He never woke up," said Milton Rhodes.
Then he told me that queer story about Isaac Barrow, or, rather, about his father. When sent to school, at Charter-house, young Barrow raised the very deuce and raised it high; so much deuce, in fact, that dad Barrow, whilst praying, said that, if it should be the Divine pleasure to take from him any of his children, he could best stand the loss of Isaac.
And did I know what the heart of a man does when his head is cut off? I (who was wondering at his sudden turn to these queer scientific matters) said I supposed that the heart stops beating. But Milton Rhodes said no; the organ continues its pulsations for an hour or longer.
And had I heard of Spallanzani's very curious experiment with the crow? I never had, but I wanted to. Spallanzani, Milton told me, gave a crow a good feed and then chopped its head off. (That decapitation didn't surprise me any, for I knew that Spallanzani was a real scientist.) The body was placed in a temperature the same as that of the living bird and kept there for six hours. Spallanzani then took the body out, opened it and found that the food which he had given the bird was thoroughly digested.
"These scientists," was my comment, "are queer birds themselves."
Then he told me some strange things about sympathetic vibrations—that a drinking-glass can be smashed by the human voice (I knew that) that an alpine avalanche can be started thundering down by the tinkle of a bell; and so, as Tyndall tells us, the muleteers in the Swiss mountains silence the bells of their animals when in proximity to such danger. And he told me of that musician who came near destroying the Colebrook Dale suspension bridge with his fiddle.[5]
Then came the strangest thing of all—the story of Vogt's cricket. The professor severed the body of a cricket (a living cricket, of course) into two pieces, and the fore part then turned round and ate up the hinder!