"Not so entirely; but perhaps more sadly. You know that by his theory--a perfectly absurd one--all causation was referred to the agency of bacilli--_bacteria_ we used to call them, but the other word is the more correct. Moreover, he was indulging in a life-long hope, to establish, in his own person, the one thing which alone convinces the multitude,--ocular proof (as the outsiders term it) that the human race has lost its noblest, and far more essential member than the head is--in a word, its tail, by assuming an attitude never contemplated, in the scientific stages of evolution. A learned American has, in my opinion, cut the ground from under the feet of Chocolous, by showing that the caudal loss results from the abandonment of the quadrumanous life; and that the only chance of recovery lies in the resignation, not of chair, but house, and the reinstitution of arboreal habitude. But, to pretermit his theories, (which appear to me weak and outrageous) his end, before even the nucleolus of a tail was established, is a most melancholy tale. The very day after he had inoculated his dextral ulna with a new bacillus (discovered in the windpipe of a duck) he received,--as the rule is with learned Germans, and the exception with learned Englishmen,--a most flattering invitation--which is in fact a command--to present himself in very high quarters. You may suppose, what a fuss he was in--for few of those foreigners have much self-respect--to put himself into his very best clothes, and to have all his theories ready in his hat. I suppose, that he would not be allowed to carry that, but I have never had the opportunity of learning." "Surely, sir," I said, "with all your fame, and all the immense things, that you have discovered----" "No, Tommy, no!" he replied, with much meekness; "but my scientific status is none the worse for that. However, Herr Chocolous, the distinguished German, was happy to be thought worth looking at; and he prepared himself well, in every point but one. He should have provided himself with cross-trees, or guttapercha buffers, ever so small, just to take his bearing. 'What will you do, if you have to sit down?' I asked him, with some prescience of the woe in store for him. 'Bosh!' was his answer, for he loved that word, 'zey vill never ask a poor man, like me, to seet!' 'Well, I dare say not,' I replied, having never found any occasion to understand such things; and off he went, standing up in a Hansom, and looking more like Punch, than a man of any science.