When I reached Cumberland Terrace, I was, as I expected, shown up into Wotherspoon’s sanctum. I found him, as usual, deeply engrossed in work: he had his eye to the tube of a large microscope, down which he was staring intently. I noticed a slight change in the equipment of the room. There seemed to be fewer retorts, flasks and test-tube racks than there usually were; and two large tables at the windows were littered with flat glass dishes containing thin slabs of pinkish material which seemed to be gelatine. Things like incubators took up a good deal of the remaining space. But I doubt if it is worth while describing what I saw: I know very little of such things; and I question whether his apparatus would have passed muster with an expert in any case. After a certain amount of fumbling with the microscope, which seemed largely a formal matter leading to nothing, he rose from his seat and greeted me with his customary pre-occupied air. For a time we smoked and talked of Henley-Davenport’s work; but after he had answered my questions it became evident that he had no further interest in the subject; and I was not surprised when, after a pause, he broke entirely new ground in his next remark. “Do you know, Flint,” he said, “I am losing interest in all these investigations of the atomic structure. It seems to me that while unimaginative people like Henley-Davenport are groping into the depths of the material Universe, the real thing is passing them by. After all, what is mere matter in comparison with the problems of life? I have given up atoms and I am going to begin work upon living organisms.” That was so characteristic of Wotherspoon. He was always “losing interest in” something and “going to begin work” upon something else. I nodded without saying anything. After all, it seemed of very little importance what he “worked” at. “I wonder if you ever reflect, Flint,” he continued, “if you ever ponder over our position in this Universe? Here we stand, like Dante, ‘midway in this our mortal life’; at the half-way house between the cradle and the grave in time. And in space, too, we represent the middle term between the endless stretches of the Macrocosm and the bottomless deeps of the Microcosm. Look up at the night-sky and your eyes will tingle with the rays from long-dead stars, suns that were blotted out ages ago though the light they sent out before they died still thrills across the ether on its journey to our Earth. Take your microscope, and you find a new world before you; increase the magnification and another, tinier cosmos sweeps into your ken. And so, with ever-growing lens-power, we can peer either upward into stellar space or downward into the regions of the infinitesimal, while between these deeps we ourselves stand for a time on our precarious bridge of Earth.”