At this point of Aristotle's narrative Homeric laughter seized all present, and Aristophanes patted the Stagirite on the back, saying: "Pray, consider yourself engaged. At the next performance of my best comedy you will be my protagonist." Aristotle thanked him with much grace, and continued: "I was naturally very curious to learn what my Professor of History thought of the great Greeks of my own time and of that of my ancestors. I mentioned Homer. I had barely done so but what my professor burst into a coarse and disdainful guffaw. "'Homer?' he exclaimed; 'Homer?--but of whom do you speak? Homer is nothing more nor less than a multiple syndicate of street-ballad-singers who, by a belated process of throwing back the "reflex" of present and modern events to remote ages, and by the well-known means of literary contamination, epical syncretism, and religious, mythopoeic, and subconscious impersonation have been hashed into the appearance of one great poet. "'Our critical methods, my young friend, are so keen that, to speak by way of simile, we are able to spot, from looking at the footprints of a man walking in the sand, what sort of buttons he wore on his cuffs. "'Poor Cuvier--otherwise one of my revered colleagues--used to say: "Give me a tooth of an animal and I will reconstruct the rest of the animal's body." What is Cuvier's feat as compared with ours? He still wanted a tooth; he still was in need of so clumsy and palpable a thing as a tooth; perhaps a molar. We, the super-Cuviers of history, we do not want a tooth any more than toothache; we want nothing. No tooth, no footprint even, simply nothing. Is it not divine? We form, as it were, an _Ex Nihilo_ Club. We have nothing, we want nothing, and yet give everything. Although we have neither leg to stand on, nor tooth to bite with, we staunchly prove that Homer was not Homer, but a lot of Homers. Is that not marvellous? But even this, my young friend, is only a trifle. We have done far greater things. "'These ancient Greeks (quite clever fellows, I must tell you, and some of them _could_ write grammatical Greek), these ancient Greeks had, amongst other remarkable men, one called Aristotle. He wrote quite a number of works; of course, not quite as many as he thought he did. For we have proved by our _Ex Nihilo_ methods that much of what he thought he had written was not written by him, but dictated. We have gone even so far (I myself, although used to our exploits, stand sometimes agape at our sagacity), we have gone so far as to prove that in the dictation of some of his writings Aristotle was repeatedly interrupted by letters or telephonic messages, which accounts for gaps and other shortcomings.