had not acquired five per cent. of the knowledge which ought to have
been in their possession; they assured everybody who had ears to
listen that it was a miracle that they had passed; the uninitiated
would not have believed a word of it. And some of the young masters,
now that the barrier between pupil and teacher was removed, and
simulation was no longer necessary, swore solemnly, with half-intoxicated
gestures, that there was not a single master in the whole school who
would not have been plucked. A sober person could not help drawing the
conclusion that the examination was like a line which could be drawn at
will between upper and lower classes; and then he saw in the miracle
nothing but a gigantic fraud.

It was one of the masters who, sipping a glass of punch, maintained
that only an idiot could imagine that a human brain could remember at
the same time: the three thousand dates mentioned in history; the
names of the five thousand towns situated in all parts of the world;
the names of six hundred plants and seven hundred animals; the bones
in the human body, the stones which form the crust of the earth, all
theological disputes, one thousand French words, one thousand English,
one thousand German, one thousand Latin, one thousand Greek, half a
million rules and exceptions to the rules: five hundred mathematical,
physical, geometrical, chemical formulas. He was willing to prove that
in order to be capable of such a feat the brain would have to be as
large as the cupola of the Observatory at Upsala. Humboldt, he went on
to say, finally forgot his tables, and the professor of astronomy at
Lund had been unable to divide two whole numbers of six figures each.
The newly-fledged under-graduates imagined that they knew six
languages, and yet they knew no more than five thousand words at most
of the twenty thousand which composed their mother tongue. And hadn't
he seen how they cheated? Oh! he knew all their tricks! He had seen