to blow it clears again, whereas intruth you may blow into the

stuff from the lime-water bottle until you are crimson in the face

andpainful under the ears, and it never becomes cloudy at all. And

Iknew, too, that in science if you put potassium chlorate into a

retort and heat it over a Bunsen burner, oxygen is disengaged and

may be collected over water, whereas inreal life if you do anything

of the sort the vessel cracks with a loud report, the potassium

chlorate descends sizzling upon the flame, the experimenter says

"Oh! Damn!" with astonishing heartiness and distinctness, and a lady

student in the back seats gets up and leaves the room.

Science is the organised conquest of Nature, and I can quite

understand that ancient libertine refusing to cooperate in her own

undoing. And I can quiteunderstand, too, my father's preference

for what he called an illustrative experiment, which was simply an

arrangement of the apparatus in front of the class with nothing

whatever by way of material, and the Bunsen burner clean and cool,

and then a slow luminous description of just what you did put in it

when you were so ill-advised as to carry the affair beyond

illustration, and just exactly what ought anyhow to happen when you

did. He had considerable powers of vivid expression, so that in

this way he could make ussee all he described. The class, freed

from any unpleasant nervous tension, could draw this still life

without flinching, and if any part was too difficult to draw, then

my father would produce a simplified version on the blackboard to be

copied instead. And he would also write on the blackboard any

exceptionally difficult but grant-earning words, such as

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