It seemed a bit droll thus to be confronted with so much strange work performed by his own natural body,—thought out in his own brain cells, and written with his own hand,—during the time that these chattels had been entrusted to the Sylan. Yet the results were gratifying. For here were not any folderol romances such as Gerald himself, he felt uneasily, might have perhaps contrived with those brain cells and that hand, romances which at best would have wasted his readers’ time, and at worst might have incited unedifying and improper notions. Instead, these quartos were all serious and learned and scholastic works. Gerald therefore regarded these large quartos with a justifiable pride and with profound respect. Their very bindings were in themselves as incompatible with anything frivolous as were their contents with any unscientific double meanings. These books had the fine clarity of a physician in conference with a midwife. Moreover, Gerald’s admiring eyes found nearly every page empedestalled upon the most impressive looking kind of footnotes: upon tall footnotes in almost illegibly small type; upon huge polyglottic footnotes very full of numerals and brackets, which flatteringly assumed your acquaintance with all human tongues and your possession of all printed books, so that you could be referred offhand to such and such a page of an especial edition; and upon footnotes which appeared to quote from the literature of every known language after having abbreviated the title of each cited volume into unintelligibility. For these quartos dealt with no romantic nonsense such as the phantasms with which novels vitiate the intelligence and the morals of their readers, Gerald observed, but with really worth-while ethnographic matters like the marriage customs of all lands, and the ways of male and female prostitution among the different races, and with the history in each country of paederasty, and of lesbianism, and of bestiality, and of necrophily, and of incest, and of sodomy, and of onanism, and of all manifestations of the sexual impulse in every era. There, in a more imaginative vein, were the _Tentative Restoration of the Lost Books of Elephantis_, the handsomely illustrated _Seed of Minos_, the doctoral thesis upon _Lingham Worship_, the _Fertility Rites of the Sabbat_, the privately published _Myth of Anistar and Calmoora_, the _Study of Priapos_, and the various other monumental works which, although Gerald did not know this, had already made Gerald Musgrave’s name familiar to the lecture halls of all universities and the pages of the more learned reviews.