There are a number of experts who claim to be able to expose a worm-hole that would deceive any worm in the world; but there are occasions when groups of the most serious and profound experts become embroiled over a particular painting or piece of furniture, some claiming fiercely that the article in question was produced in 1519, and others maintaining noisily that it was done in 1915. The only satisfactory way in which such a matter could ever be settled would be to have a war over it. Large numbers of experts have also gone into ecstasies over certain beautiful Old Masters: expert has purchased a painting from expert, running up the price at each change of hands until its cost is on a par with that of a new Town Hall; then some low, coarse, non-expert has come along with an X-ray machine and shown, by X-raying the paint, that it is so new that its value is somewhat less than that of a dog-house. The best of the renaissance and primitive and seventeenth century artists now producing Italian and French antique paintings are full of quaint conceits for the intriguing (if one may use so coarse an expression) of experts on paintings. They welcome the cynical and wary purchasers who start to examine a painting by looking at its back in order to make sure that the canvas is old. They beam affectionately at the suspicious buyers who must have a certain number of cracks to the square inch of surface, who count the fly specks with loving care, who test the paint with alcohol in order to find out whether it is new paint or old paint, and who hunt so assiduously for that rich and mellow golden-brown tone that comes only with age. A golden-brown glow on a painting is a sign that it was painted back in those good old roistering, swashbuckling days when the most sincere fighters and the noisiest drinkers wore lace frills around the bottoms of their short plush sport-clothes. Fortunately the same beautiful effect can be obtained by dissolving licorice in water, pouring the result on the canvas and rubbing it around for a few moments with the palm of the hand. Very beautiful and realistic fly-speck effects may be added by dissolving gum arabic in water, coloring the liquid with sepia and Chinese ink, dipping an ancient toothbrush into it, and spraying it on the canvas by drawing a match along the toothbrush bristles. The wisest fly that looked at the result would declare unhesitatingly that a yearly fly-convention had been held on the painting ever since Christopher Columbus abandoned the flat-earth theory, and that all the leading speckers of the fly race had tracked their muddy feet on it at one time or another. It’s a poor human that can’t beat an insect.