III.

The idea was Mr. Bensington's. But as it was suggested to him by one of
Professor Redwood's contributions to the Philosophical Transactions, he
very properly consulted that gentleman before he carried it further.
Besides which it was, as a research, a physiological, quite as much as a
chemical inquiry.

Professor Redwood was one of those scientific men who are addicted to
tracings and curves. You are familiar--if you are at all the sort of
reader I like--with the sort of scientific paper I mean. It is a paper
you cannot make head nor tail of, and at the end come five or six long
folded diagrams that open out and show peculiar zigzag tracings, flashes
of lightning overdone, or sinuous inexplicable things called "smoothed
curves" set up on ordinates and rooting in abscissae--and things like
that. You puzzle over the thing for a long time and end with the
suspicion that not only do you not understand it but that the author
does not understand it either. But really you know many of these
scientific people understand the meaning of their own papers quite well:
it is simply a defect of expression that raises the obstacle between us.

I am inclined to think that Redwood thought in tracings and curves. And
after his monumental work upon Reaction Times (the unscientific reader
is exhorted to stick to it for a little bit longer and everything will
be as clear as daylight) Redwood began to turn out smoothed curves and
sphygmographeries upon Growth, and it was one of his papers upon Growth
that really gave Mr. Bensington his idea.

Redwood, you know, had been measuring growing things of all sorts,