not simply one centre of distribution, but quite a number of centres.
There was one at Ealing--there can be no doubt now--and from that came
the plague of flies and red spider; there was one at Sunbury, productive
of ferocious great eels, that could come ashore and kill sheep; and
there was one in Bloomsbury that gave the world a new strain of
cockroaches of a quite terrible sort--an old house it was in Bloomsbury,
and much inhabited by undesirable things. Abruptly the world found
itself confronted with the Hickleybrow experiences all over again, with
all sorts of queer exaggerations of familiar monsters in the place of
the giant hens and rats and wasps. Each centre burst out with its own
characteristic local fauna and flora....

We know now that every one of these centres corresponded to one of the
patients of Doctor Winkles, but that was by no means apparent at the
time. Doctor Winkles was the last person to incur any odium in the
matter. There was a panic quite naturally, a passionate indignation, but
it was indignation not against Doctor Winkles but against the Food, and
not so much against the Food as against the unfortunate Bensington, whom
from the very first the popular imagination had insisted upon regarding
as the sole and only person responsible for this new thing.

The attempt to lynch him that followed is just one of those explosive
events that bulk largely in history and are in reality the least
significant of occurrences.

The history of the outbreak is a mystery. The nucleus of the crowd
certainly came from an Anti-Boomfood meeting in Hyde Park organised by
extremists of the Caterham party, but there seems no one in the world
who actually first proposed, no one who ever first hinted a suggestion
of the outrage at which so many people assisted. It is a problem for M.