a newspaper turned his thoughts to an Experimental Farm.

And chicks. Directly he thought of it, he thought of it as a poultry
farm. He was suddenly taken with a vision of wildly growing chicks. He
conceived a picture of coops and runs, outsize and still more outsize
coops, and runs progressively larger. Chicks are so accessible, so
easily fed and observed, so much drier to handle and measure, that for
his purpose tadpoles seemed to him now, in comparison with them, quite
wild and uncontrollable beasts. He was quite puzzled to understand why
he had not thought of chicks instead of tadpoles from the beginning.
Among other things it would have saved all this trouble with his cousin
Jane. And when he suggested this to Redwood, Redwood quite agreed with
him.

Redwood said that in working so much upon needlessly small animals he
was convinced experimental physiologists made a great mistake. It is
exactly like making experiments in chemistry with an insufficient
quantity of material; errors of observation and manipulation become
disproportionately large. It was of extreme importance just at present
that scientific men should assert their right to have their material
_big_. That was why he was doing his present series of experiments at
the Bond Street College upon Bull Calves, in spite of a certain amount
of inconvenience to the students and professors of other subjects caused
by their incidental levity in the corridors. But the curves he was
getting were quite exceptionally interesting, and would, when published,
amply justify his choice. For his own part, were it not for the
inadequate endowment of science in this country, he would never, if he
could avoid it, work on anything smaller than a whale. But a Public
Vivarium on a sufficient scale to render this possible was, he feared,
at present, in this country at any rate, a Utopian demand. In