The very fact that scientific investigation still had, to some
minds, a flavour of heterodoxy, gave it a perennial interest. The
mob had broken down the walls of tradition to batten in the orchard
of forbidden knowledge. The inaccessible goddess whom the Professor
had served in his youth now offered her charms in the market-place.
And yet it was not the same goddess after all, but a pseudo-science
masquerading in the garb of the real divinity. This false goddess
had her ritual and her literature. She had her sacred books, written
by false priests and sold by millions to the faithful. In the most
successful of these works, ancient dogma and modern discovery were
depicted in a close embrace under the lime-lights of a hazy
transcendentalism; and the tableau never failed of its effect. Some
of the books designed on this popular model had lately fallen into
the Professor's hands, and they filled him with mingled rage and
hilarity. The rage soon died: he came to regard this mass of
pseudo-literature as protecting the truth from desecration. But the
hilarity remained, and flowed into the form of his idea. And the
idea--the divine, incomparable idea--was simply that he should
avenge his goddess by satirizing her false interpreters. He would
write a skit on the "popular" scientific book; he would so heap
platitude on platitude, fallacy on fallacy, false analogy on false
analogy, so use his superior knowledge to abound in the sense of the
ignorant, that even the gross crowd would join in the laugh against
its augurs. And the laugh should be something more than the
distension of mental muscles; it should be the trumpet-blast
bringing down the walls of ignorance, or at least the little stone
striking the giant between the eyes.