“Did I not say to you, ‘The time is drawing near when you shall know all?’ Nicolas, you are now going to know all, and indeed it would not please me to pass as a devil--a miracle-monger, or a sorcerer. I am neither Belphegor, nor Moses, nor Merlin--I am just Lerne, _tout court_! My power does not come from the outside, it is my own, and I am proud of it. It is my science. All that one could say by way of correction, is, that it is the science of humanity, which I have continued in my day, and of which I am the most advanced pioneer and chief master. “But, do not let us be conceited! Do the bandages stop up your ears? Can you hear me?” I made a sign with my head. “Well, listen, then, and do not roll your eyes about--all will be explained.” Good Lord! we are not in Wonderland. The assistants were cleaning and arranging the instruments. My body was asleep and snoring. Lerne dragged his stool up beside me, and sat down, with his mouth on a level with my ear, and discoursed in the following terms: “To begin with, my nephew, I was wrong a moment ago, in calling you ‘Jupiter.’ To use words in an exact way, I have not metamorphosed you into a bull, and you are still Nicolas Vermont, for the name denotes, above all, the personality which is the soul and not the body. “As, on the one hand, you have kept your soul, and as, on the other, the soul has its seat in the brain, it is easy for you to argue by induction, in the presence of those surgical instruments, that I have just exchanged Jupiter’s brain with yours and that it now lives in your cast-off body. “You will probably say, Nicolas, that it is a disgusting pleasantry on my part! “You do not divine either the supreme object of my studies, nor the series of ideas which has inspired them, and yet, from this logical series is derived this little pleasantry derived from Ovid; but it is possible that it means nothing to you, for I have only gone in for this by the way. “We will call it, if you like, a workshop joke! “No, my ultimate aim does not reveal itself in this form--a funny and malicious one, you will admit, but puerile, without any results social or industrial that can be exploited. “My aim is the ‘introversion’ of human personalities, which I have endeavored to achieve, in the first place, by the interchange of brains. “You know my inveterate passion for flowers! I have always cultivated them with the utmost enthusiasm. My earlier life was absorbed by my profession, which was interrupted only on Sundays with this recreation--a day’s gardening. “Well, the hobby influenced my profession. Grafting influenced my surgery, and in the hospital I was inclined to give myself up more especially to animal grafting. I became a specialist in that, and grew fond of it, finding in my clinics the enthusiasm of the hothouse.