me nearly a year ago. "Either they increase the central energy
without affecting the nerves or they simply increase the available
energy by lowering the nervous conductivity; and all of them are
unequal and local in their operation. One wakes up the heart and
viscera and leaves the brain stupefied, one gets at the brain
champagne fashion and does nothing good for the solar plexus, and
what I want--and what, if it's an earthly possibility, I mean to have--
is a stimulant that stimulates all round, that wakes you up for
a time from the crown of your head to the tip of your great toe,
and makes you go two--or even three--to everybody else's one. Eh?
That's the thing I'm after."

"It would tire a man," I said.

"Not a doubt of it. And you'd eat double or treble--and all that.
But just think what the thing would mean. Imagine yourself with
a little phial like this"--he held up a little bottle of green glass
and marked his points with it--"and in this precious phial is
the power to think twice as fast, move twice as quickly, do twice
as much work in a given time as you could otherwise do."

"But is such a thing possible?"

"I believe so. If it isn't, I've wasted my time for a year. These
various preparations of the hypophosphites, for example, seem
to show that something of the sort . . . Even if it was only one
and a half times as fast it would do."

"It WOULD do," I said.