Затерянный мир / The Lost World - стр. 14
“Will you come to the meeting with me?” I asked suddenly.
Tarp Henry looked thoughtful.
“He is not a popular person,” said he. “I should say he is about the best-hated man in London. If the medical students turn out there will be no end of a mess.”
“You might at least do him justice to hear him state his own case.”
“Well, it’s fair. All right. I’m your man for the evening.”
When we arrived at the hall we found more people than I had expected. The audience would be popular as well as scientific. We had taken our seats. Looking behind me, I could see rows of faces of the familiar medical student type. Apparently the great hospitals had each sent down their contingent. The behaviour of the audience at present was good-humoured, but mischievous.
The greatest demonstration of all, however, was at the entrance of my new acquaintance, Professor Challenger, when he passed down to take his place. Such a yell of welcome broke forth that I began to suspect Tarp Henry was right that this audience was there not for the sake of the lecture, but because the famous Professor would take part in the proceedings.
Challenger smiled with weary and tolerant contempt, as a kindly man would meet the yapping of puppies. He sat slowly down, blew out his chest, passed his hand down his beard, and looked with drooping eyelids at the crowded hall before him.
Mr. Waldron, the lecturer, came up, and the proceedings began. He was a stern, gaunt man, with a harsh voice, and an aggressive manner. However he knew how to pass the ideas in a way which was intelligible and even interesting to the public. He told us of the globe, a huge mass of flaming gas. Then he pictured the solidification, the cooling, how the mountains were formed. On the origin of life itself he was vague. Had it built itself out of the cooling, inorganic elements of the globe? Very likely. Had the germs of it arrived from outside upon a meteor? Even the wisest man was the least categorical upon the point.
This brought the lecturer to the animal life, beginning with mollusks and sea creatures, then up rung by rung through reptiles and fishes, till at last mammals. Then he went back to his picture of the past: the drying of the seas, the overcrowded lagoons with sea animals, the tendency of the sea creatures to come out of the sea, the abundance of food awaiting them, their consequent enormous growth.
“Hence, ladies and gentlemen,” he added, “those creatures, which still frighten us, but which were fortunately extinct long before the first appearance of mankind upon this planet.”