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“I will not detain you,” he said. “It is not worth it. Truth is truth, and the noise of a number of foolish young men – and, I fear I must add, of their equally foolish seniors – cannot affect the matter. I claim that I have opened a new field of science. You dispute it.” (Cheers.) “Then I put you to the test. Will you accredit one or more of your own number to go out as your representatives and test my statement in your name?”

Mr Summerlee, the veteran Professor of Comparative Anatomy, rose among the audience, a tall, thin, bitter man, with the withered aspect of a theologian. He wished, he said, to ask Professor Challenger whether the results to which he had alluded in his remarks had been obtained during a journey to the headwaters of the Amazon made by him two years before.

Professor Challenger answered that they had.

Mr Summerlee desired to know how it was that Professor Challenger claimed to have made discoveries in those regions which had been overlooked by Wallace, Bates, and other previous explorers of established scien-tific repute.

Professor Challenger answered that Mr Summerlee appeared to be confusing the Amazon with the Thames; that it was in reality a somewhat larger river; that Mr Summerlee might be interested to know that with the Orinoco, which communicated with it, some fifty thousand miles of country were opened up, and that in so vast a space it was not impossible for one person to find what another had missed.

Mr Summerlee declared, with an acid smile, that he fully appreciated the difference between the Thames and the Amazon, which lay in the fact that any assertion about the former could be tested, while about the latter it could not. He would be obliged if Professor Challenger would give the latitude and the longitude of the country in which prehistoric animals were to be found.

Professor Challenger replied that he reserved such information for good reasons of his own, but would be prepared to give it with proper precautions to a committee chosen from the audience. Would Mr Summerlee serve on such a committee and test his story in person?