It was from another of the younger scientists at the Foundation, Dr. Ernest Ralton, that the Association had secured this statement of Dr. Munson's whereabouts, and Ralton had offered, moreover, to fly north in his plane to the island and lay the Association's request before the famous biologist. This offer had been at once accepted, for it was not doubted that Dr. Munson's passion for experimentation would cause him to accept the chief place on the committee of research. Late on the afternoon of the 27th, therefore, announcement was made from the World Science Association's office that Ralton had left in his plane for the island, and that when he returned with Dr. Munson the Association's committee of research would be formed and would start its investigations. This announcement, though it caused the disputing biologists to await keenly Dr. Munson's return, proved unexciting to newspapers and public, whose first half-interest in the phenomenon had begun to wane. The newspapers, indeed, in publishing the Association's announcement humorously suggested that the whole controversy over the origin of some slime on the world's beaches was a battle between tweedledum and tweedledee. And the public, with a guffaw or a smile, assented. The whole thing merely went to show the craziness of scientists--thus did common sense deliver itself, that evening. Common sense was not to suspect, certainly, what strange craziness it was that lay behind the appearance of that glistening slime. Common sense was not to dream, until it awoke to the thunder of crashing worlds, what terrible craziness it was that had loosed upon humanity with that glistening scum a titanic tide of dreadful death which even at that moment was surging slowly upward to sweep across all the world. 2 Just before midnight on that same night it was, less than a dozen hours after the Association's announcement, that the horror broke upon the world. Had the thing come gradually upon us, place by place and event after event, it would be possible to give some consecutive account of it, now. But, crashing down upon almost all the astounded world at the same moment as it did, the very scope of it makes futile any efforts to describe completely the terror of that world when it awoke to doom. It is enough, indeed, if we can give some impression of its action at such a city as New York, for there, of all places, its horror was the most intensified.