Certainly both Mr. Bensington and Professor Redwood quite merited any of
these terms long before they came upon the marvellous discovery of which
this story tells. Mr. Bensington was a Fellow of the Royal Society and
a former president of the Chemical Society, and Professor Redwood was
Professor of Physiology in the Bond Street College of the London
University, and he had been grossly libelled by the anti-vivisectionists
time after time. And they had led lives of academic distinction from
their very earliest youth.

They were of course quite undistinguished looking men, as indeed all
true Scientists are. There is more personal distinction about the
mildest-mannered actor alive than there is about the entire Royal
Society. Mr. Bensington was short and very, very bald, and he stooped
slightly; he wore gold-rimmed spectacles and cloth boots that were
abundantly cut open because of his numerous corns, and Professor Redwood
was entirely ordinary in his appearance. Until they happened upon the
Food of the Gods (as I must insist upon calling it) they led lives of
such eminent and studious obscurity that it is hard to find anything
whatever to tell the reader about them.

Mr. Bensington won his spurs (if one may use such an expression of a
gentleman in boots of slashed cloth) by his splendid researches upon the
More Toxic Alkaloids, and Professor Redwood rose to eminence--I do not
clearly remember how he rose to eminence! I know he was very eminent,
and that's all. Things of this sort grow. I fancy it was a voluminous
work on Reaction Times with numerous plates of sphygmograph tracings (I
write subject to correction) and an admirable new terminology, that did
the thing for him.