He was coming to inform me that my father had died and I had been named his
only heir. He also told me that if I did not want to go immediately back to the
country, he had brought for me to be signed some letters of attorney to allow
his fellows to look after the most urgent matters of administration. I signed
those proxies without not even reading them. On the economic plan I would have
been now stronger than ever. My studies would get a great advantage from
this new decisive financial impulse. But why didn't I feel any pain? Yet I had
loved him, in the cheerful days of the infancy; and he had loved me. Thinking
about the years of my infancy and the coasts of beloved and distant Cornwall, I
finished to consume my poor meal, then I returned downstairs. I
immediately noticed that something strange had happened during my brief
absence. In the test-tube the brain of the cat had dried, acquiring a grey and
pale color. I extracted it with the pliers: it seemed a dry sponge without
neither weight nor smell. What devil had it happened? It was a gust of
wind which answered to me. In that underground where I secretly
developed my experiments, I had not left but a small window, that I wanted
surfaced to the level of the ground. It had slightly disclosed , quiet enough
to allow the passage of a provident ray of sun which, intruding the optic
circuit of the microscope, had poured in with all its mighty energy,
dehydrating completely the object of my experiments. But my light,
initial disappointment had soon to be transformed in high exultation, when I
closer observed the test-tube that had served like furnace to that unforeseen
experiment. On its fund rested some drops of a dense and glimmering liquid! I
had a lightning, an intuition that afterwards had to be exactly revealed. Admirably
exact, my friends! I had found the way to extract from the muscle that contains
our life, from the brain that contains all the knowledge of a human being its
own essence. An extract, a summary, that is the same, but free from the
physical brain’s encumbrance, from the grey mash that contains it. Free from
the flesh as a soul is free from his body as an idea from his thinker as a
thought from his action! As you certainly know all our mental energy
springs by a simple chemical reaction that is continuously produced in our
brain. Such reaction, that the physicians define with the name of “synapse”,
is originated by the reaction between the liquid secretion in the brain and the
cells on it introduced. In practice this liquid, that has equal
molecular structure in every man, works as a tracing detector of the cerebral
fabric, whose composition is, instead, what countersigns a man from another.
The intimate reasons for such different composition of the cerebral fabric,
have seen for a long time divided the humanity. Manhood has however been
until now incapable to intend the true reason for the difference of the beings
of its species. A human being, from the scientific point of view, it is only a
product of a casual connection of the basically chemical mixtures that are
contained in the cells. And all its activity is coordinated by the cerebral
cells. To succeed on getting a distillate of those cells, meant
therefore to dispose of a substance of inestimable value. You can of course
imagine, what such emotion I felt when I injected those drops that were deposed
on the fund of the test-tube, to a guinea-pig. The result was amazing,
great and more meaningful than I had been able to foresee myself.
...to be continued...
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