But when those scientists met, the world learned that they had a hundred different explanations of the thing, no two agreeing. The famous American alienist who had voiced his opinion days before reiterated his belief that the minds of men were giving way _en masse_ beneath the strain of modern civilization. A Rumanian bacteriologist claimed that the thing was the result of a contagious new brain disease spreading over earth, and claimed even to have isolated the bacterium of that disease. The scientists, gripped seemingly by something of the erratic condition of mind they were striving to explain, argued these theories and others with utmost passion, sometimes attacking each other. An English physicist, who suggested that earth was passing through strange mind-affecting gases in space, was assaulted by the proponent of another theory. And still more furious and incredulous, the world learned, was the reception given to the explanation of a New York biologist named Ferson, who claimed that the whole great terror was the result of the human races slipping backward on the road of evolution! "World atavism! A throwback of all the world's life on the road of evolution!" So, they learned, Ferson had cried to the assembled scientists. "All earth's animal life is beginning to slip back, and man, as the most recently developed animal, is slipping first, is going back toward the savage state, toward the cave-man or troglodyte, toward the ape! He is losing control of his passions as he goes back, which accounts for the violence that now fills earth! And he is losing the mental capacity of modern man, which accounts for his inability to operate longer our modern machines! A world atavism that is beginning with the atavism of the human races!" "But what could cause such world atavism as that?" the incredulous scientists had cried. "The evolutionary theory of my former associate, Dr. Grant----" Ferson had begun, but was interrupted by a chorus of derisive shouts provoked by the mention of the scientist whose ridiculous theory had been exploded. So Ferson had been forced from the meeting by the furious scientists, who seemed seized indeed with the erratic craziness that was gripping the world. Another day they advanced and argued their theories, theories that grew ever more impossible, more incoherent, and then the meeting dissolved in a general riotous brawl of the arguing scientists. They, in common with the rest of the races of men, seemed incapable longer of calm thought, of cool, unpassioned reasoning. Two were killed, throttled in the brawl that ended the meeting, and the rest scattered. They were not followed or punished, for now the disintegration of humanity's institutions had become such that crime was unheeded.