He rushed about his shop in a search of distraught eagerness, and with a multitude of small exclamations, until, screeching jubilantly once, he pounced upon a shabby and learned-looking volume.  This he brought me, thrusting it with his trembling fingers between my own, and shuffling the open pages.  But when the apparently right one was found, he exclaimed, “No, I have better! and dashed away to a pile of pamphlets on the floor, where he began to plough and harrow.  Wondering if I was closeted with a maniac, I looked at the book in my passive hand, and saw diagrams of various bones to me unknown, and men’s names of which I was equally ignorant—­Mivart, Topinard, and more,—­but at last that of Huxley.  But this agreeable sight was spoiled at once by the quite horrible words Nycticebidoe, platyrrhine, catarrhine, from which I raised my eyes to see him coming at me with two pamphlets, and scolding as he came.

“Are you educated, yes?  Have been to college, yes?  Then perhaps you will understand.”

Certainly I understood immediately that he and his pamphlets were as bad as the book, or worse, in their use of a vocabulary designed to cause almost any listener the gravest inconvenience.  Common Eocene ancestors occurred at the beginning of his lecture; and I believed that if it got no stronger than this, I could at least preserve the appearance of comprehending him; but it got stronger, and at sacro-iliac notch I may say, without using any grossly exaggerated expression, that I became unconscious.  At least, all intelligence left me.  When it returned, he was saying.—­

“But this is only the beginning.  Come in here to my crania and jaws.”

Evidently he held me hypnotized, for he now hurried me unresisting through a back door into a dark little where he turned up the gas, and I saw shelves as in a museum, to one of which he led me.  I suppose that it was curiosity that rendered me thus sheep-like.  Upon the shelf were a number of skulls and jaws in admirable condition and graded arrangement, beginning to the left with that flat kind of skull which one associates with gorillas.  He resumed his scolding harangue, and for a few brief moments I understood him.  Here, told by themselves, was as much of the story of the skulls as we know, from manlike apes through glacial man to the modern senator or railroad president.  But my intelligence was destined soon to die away again.

“That is the Caucasian skull:  your skull,” he said, touching a specimen at the right.

“Interesting,” I murmured.  “I’m afraid I know nothing about skulls.”

“But you shall know someding before you leave,” he retorted, wagging his head at me; and this time it was not the book, but a specimen, that he pushed into my grasp.  He gave it a name, not as bad as platyrrhine, but I feared worse was coming; then he took it away from me, gave me another skull, and while I obediently held it, pronounced something quite beyond me.