he deliberately insulted me by covering up his memoranda. It seems

he has some brilliant research on hand that he suspects me of all

people--with a Bodley Booklet a-printing!--of stealing. He has taken

remarkable honours at the University--he went through them with

a sort of hasty slobber, as though he feared I might interrupt him

before he had told me all--and he spoke of taking his D.Sc. as one

might speak of taking a cab. And he asked what I was doing--with

a sort of comparative accent, and his arm was spread nervously,

positively a protecting arm, over the paper that hid the precious

idea--his one hopeful idea.



"'Poetry,' he said, 'Poetry. And what do you profess to teach

in it, Hicks?'



"The thing's a Provincial professorling in the very act of budding,

and I thank the Lord devoutly that but for the precious gift

of indolence I also might have gone this way to D.Sc. and

destruction . . ."



A curious little vignette that I am inclined to think caught Filmer

in or near the very birth of his discovery. Hicks was wrong in

anticipating a provincial professorship for Filmer. Our next glimpse

of him is lecturing on "rubber and rubber substitutes," to the

Society of Arts--he had become manager to a great plastic-substance

manufactory--and at that time, it is now known, he was a member

of the Aeronautical Society, albeit he contributed nothing to the

discussions of that body, preferring no doubt to mature his great

conception without external assistance. And within two years

of that paper before the Society of Arts he was hastily taking out

a number of patents and proclaiming in various undignified ways

the completion of the divergent inquiries which made his flying

machine possible. The first definite statement to that effect

appeared in a halfpenny evening paper through the agency of a man

who lodged in the same house with Filmer. His final haste after

his long laborious secret patience seems to have been due to

a needless panic, Bootle, the notorious American scientific quack,

having made an announcement that Filmer interpreted wrongly as

an anticipation of his idea.



Now what precisely was Filmer's idea? Really a very simple one.

Before his time the pursuit of aeronautics had taken two divergent

lines, and had developed on the one hand balloons--large apparatus

lighter than air, easy in ascent, and comparatively safe in descent,

but floating helplessly before any breeze that took them; and on

the other, flying machines that flew only in theory--vast flat

structures heavier than air, propelled and kept up by heavy engines

and for the most part smashing at the first descent. But, neglecting

the fact that the inevitable final collapse rendered them impossible,

the weight of the flying machines gave them this theoretical

advantage, that they could go through the air against a wind,



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