The Food of the Gods: And How It Came to Earth by H. G. Wells

Author:H. G. Wells
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Science fiction, Growth factors, Agriculture, Giants -- Fiction, Food supply
Publisher: Standard Ebooks
Published: 2024-05-02T17:52:04+00:00

III

No one knows what the Vicar made of the gi­ant puff­balls.

No doubt he was among the first to dis­cov­er them. They were scattered at in­ter­vals up and down the path between the near down and the vil­lage end—a path he fre­quen­ted daily in his con­sti­tu­tion­al round. Al­to­geth­er, of these ab­nor­mal fungi there were, from first to last, quite thirty. The Vicar seems to have stared at each sev­er­ally, and to have prod­ded most of them with his stick once or twice. One he at­temp­ted to meas­ure with his arms, but it burst at his Ix­ion em­brace.

He spoke to sev­er­al people about them, and said they were “mar­vel­lous!” and he re­lated to at least sev­en dif­fer­ent per­sons the well-known story of the flag­stone that was lif­ted from the cel­lar floor by a growth of fungi be­neath. He looked up his Sowerby to see if it was Ly­coper­don coelatum or gi­ganteum—like all his kind since Gil­bert White be­came fam­ous, he Gil­bert-Whited. He cher­ished a the­ory that gi­ganteum is un­fairly named.

One does not know if he ob­served that those white spheres lay in the very track that old wo­man of yes­ter­day had fol­lowed, or if he noted that the last of the series swelled not a score of yards from the gate of the Caddles’ cot­tage. If he ob­served these things, he made no at­tempt to place his ob­ser­va­tion on re­cord. His ob­ser­va­tion in mat­ters botan­ic­al was what the in­feri­or sort of sci­entif­ic people call a “trained ob­ser­va­tion”—you look for cer­tain def­in­ite things and neg­lect everything else. And he did noth­ing to link this phe­nomen­on with the re­mark­able ex­pan­sion of the Caddles’ baby that had been go­ing on now for some weeks, in­deed ever since Caddles walked over one Sunday af­ter­noon a month or more ago to see his moth­er-in-law and hear Mr. Skin­ner (since de­funct) brag about his man­age­ment of hens.

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