The Inheritance by Charles Finch

Author:Charles Finch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

The English custom of driving on the left side of the road had practical origins.

It had started in medieval days, when genuine knights had traveled the high way between villages. A knight kept his sword to his right as he rode, in order to have his strong hand toward the middle of the road in the event that he should cross paths with thieves or other highwaymen. To ride down the right side of the road would have meant fighting with a weaker left hand closer to the middle of the road; a possibly fatal disadvantage.

In America, that newer country, they drove on the right—and this decision, too, had a logic, for there, with the huge teams of horses required to move across the vast land, it was necessary to drive with a very long whip. By riding on the right, the drovers could keep it to the outside of the road, so that if they passed another team they would never cross whips or inadvertently strike a fellow driver.

At the Royal Society that evening, Leigh stood in front of an overflowing and rapt audience and began his lecture with this cryptic little piece of trivia.

Soon he had opened out into a larger discussion that explained it, however. First he gave them a subtle and humorous delineation of all the manifold ways in which scientific process was necessarily different from country to country—just like driving!—and then he delved into how it was different specifically, in all the innumerable places he had been during his travels. Finally, losing Lenox but evidently winning over the rest of the room, he had gone deep indeed into his own investigations into the microbe.

At the very end of the speech, he returned to America and England. “As a going concern they will surpass us in the next century, I have no doubt, the Americans,” he concluded, “but in science our tradition cannot be bettered. I am proud to join its history this evening, even if I am only a far-flung particle in the greater body.”

In the period of questions that followed there were a great many detailed interrogations into the nature of the microbe and the research of Pasteur. One questioner did return to Leigh’s final line: impossible to imagine a capital more powerful than London, he said angrily, a nation whose interests were so intricately tied to those of a hundred million souls across the globe—why, in shipping alone—

Leigh listened patiently, and then replied. “Yes, I have heard about whether or not the sun sets on our empire—that it doesn’t—but I do think it will be the States that matters more in 1976 than Britain.”

“But, sir—”

Leigh plowed ahead. “That is for two reasons. The first is that they have the common schools, which we have been foolish in the extreme not to build. I myself see four or five of my old schoolmates here this evening”—there was a brief smile at Lenox as he said this—“and understand that nobody could be better educated than our landholding class.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.