work is not done in Folkestone, but in Gower Street, in the fine

new laboratory next to the hospital that he has been the first to use.



As every one knows, or at least as all intelligent people know,

the special department in which Gibberne has gained so great

and deserved a reputation among physiologists is the action of drugs

upon the nervous system. Upon soporifics, sedatives, and anaesthetics

he is, I am told, unequalled. He is also a chemist of considerable

eminence, and I suppose in the subtle and complex jungle of riddles

that centres about the ganglion cell and the axis fibre there are

little cleared places of his making, little glades of illumination,

that, until he sees fit to publish his results, are still inaccessible

to every other living man. And in the last few years he has been

particularly assiduous upon this question of nervous stimulants,

and already, before the discovery of the New Accelerator, very

successful with them. Medical science has to thank him for at least

three distinct and absolutely safe invigorators of unrivalled value

to practising men. In cases of exhaustion the preparation known

as Gibberne's B Syrup has, I suppose, saved more lives already

than any lifeboat round the coast.



"But none of these little things begin to satisfy me yet," he told

me nearly a year ago. "Either they increase the central energy

without affecting the nerves or they simply increase the available

energy by lowering the nervous conductivity; and all of them are

unequal and local in their operation. One wakes up the heart and

viscera and leaves the brain stupefied, one gets at the brain

champagne fashion and does nothing good for the solar plexus, and

what I want--and what, if it's an earthly possibility, I mean to have--

is a stimulant that stimulates all round, that wakes you up for

a time from the crown of your head to the tip of your great toe,

and makes you go two--or even three--to everybody else's one. Eh?

That's the thing I'm after."



"It would tire a man," I said.



"Not a doubt of it. And you'd eat double or treble--and all that.

But just think what the thing would mean. Imagine yourself with

a little phial like this"--he held up a little bottle of green glass

and marked his points with it--"and in this precious phial is

the power to think twice as fast, move twice as quickly, do twice

as much work in a given time as you could otherwise do."



"But is such a thing possible?"



"I believe so. If it isn't, I've wasted my time for a year. These

various preparations of the hypophosphites, for example, seem

to show that something of the sort . . . Even if it was only one

and a half times as fast it would do."





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