The Journal of a Disappointed Man

Yesterday, I received a state visit from the Editor of the Furniture Record seeking advice on how to eradicate mites from upholstering! I received him ironically--but little did he understand. I shot up like a ball on a bagatelle board all steamy into zoology (my once beloved science) but at once rolled dead into the very low hole of Economic Entomology! Curse.... Why can't I either have a first-rate disease or be a first-rate zoologist? Now just think what a much better figure I should have cut, from the artistic view point, had I remained a newspaper reporter who had taught himself prodigious embryology out of F.M. Balfour's Textbook, who had cut sections of fowls' eggs and newt embryos with a hand microtome, who had passionately dissected out the hidden, internal anatomy of a great variety of animals, who could recite Wiedersheim's Comparative Anatomy of Vertebrates and patter off the difference between a nephridium and a cœlomic duct without turning a hair--or the phylogenetic history (how absorbing!) of the kidney--pronephros, mesonephros and metanephros and all the ducts!... All this, over now and wasted. My hardly-won knowledge wrenched away is never brought into use--it lies piled up in my brain rotting. I could have become a first-rate comparative anatomist. December 3. Cold better. So back at work--gauging ale at Dunfermline as R---- puts it. December 9. In the evening found it quite impossible to stay in the house any longer: some vague fear drove me out. I was alarmed to be alone or to be still. It is my cough, I think.