Name is porthesia chrysorrhoea. Doc Needham couldn’t tell you that! He don’t know what butterflies are called! He don’t care if you get trained. Remember that name now?” He turned on Martin. “You payin’ attention? You interested? HUH? Oh, the devil! Nobody wants to know about my museum — not a person. Only one in county but — I’m an old failure.”

Martin asserted, “Honest, it’s slick!”

“Look here! Look here! See that? In the bottle? It’s an appendix. First one ever took out ‘round here. I did it! Old Doc Vickerson, he did the first ‘pendectomy in THIS neck of the woods, you bet! And first museum. It ain’t — so big — but it’s start. I haven’t put away money like Doc Needham, but I started first c’lection — I started it!”

He collapsed in a chair, groaning, “You’re right. Got to sleep. All in.” But as Martin helped him to his feet he broke away, scrabbled about on his desk, and looked back doubtfully. “Want to give you something — start your training. And remember the old man. Will anybody remember the old man?”

He was holding out the beloved magnifying glass which for years he had used in botanizing. He watched Martin slip the lens into his pocket, he sighed, he struggled for something else to say, and silently he lumbered into his bedroom.

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Last updated on Wed Jan 12 09:40:45 2011 for eBooks@Adelaide.

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Arrowsmith, by Sinclair Lewis

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CHAPTER 2

The state of Winnemac is bounded by Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana, and like them it is half Eastern, half Midwestern. There is a feeling of New England in its brick and sycamore villages, its stable industries, and a tradition which goes back to the Revolutionary War. Zenith, the largest city in the state, was founded in 1792. But Winnemac is Midwestern in its fields of corn and wheat, its red barns and silos, and, despite the immense antiquity of Zenith, many counties were not settled till 1860.

The University of Winnemac is at Mohalis, fifteen miles from Zenith. There are twelve thousand students; beside this prodigy Oxford is a tiny theological school and Harvard a select college for young gentlemen. The University has a baseball field under glass; its buildings are measured by the mile; it hires hundreds of young Doctors of Philosophy to give rapid instruction in Sanskrit, navigation, accountancy, spectacle-fitting, sanitary engineering, Provencal poetry, tariff schedules, rutabaga-growing, motor-car designing, the history of Voronezh, the style of Matthew Arnold, the diagnosis of myohypertrophia kymoparalytica, and department-store advertising. Its president is the best money-raiser and the best after-dinner speaker in the United States; and Winnemac was the first school in the world to conduct its extension courses by radio.

It is not a snobbish rich-man’s college, devoted to leisurely nonsense. It is the property of the people of the state, and what they want — or what they are told they want — is a mill to turn out men and women who will lead moral lives, play bridge, drive good cars, be enterprising in business, and occasionally mention books, though they are not expected to have time to read them. It is a Ford Motor Factory, and if its products rattle a little, they are beautifully standardized, with perfectly interchangeable parts. Hourly the University of Winnemac grows in numbers and influence, and by 1950 one may expect it to have created an entirely new world-civilization, a civilization larger and brisker and purer.

II

In 1904, when Martin Arrowsmith was an Arts and Science Junior preparing for medical school, Winnemac had but five thousand students yet it was already brisk.

Martin was twenty-one. He still seemed pale, in contrast to his black smooth hair, but he was a respectable runner, a fair basket-ball center, and a savage hockey-player. The co-eds murmured that he “looked so romantic,” but as this was before the invention of sex and the era of petting-parties, they merely talked about him at a distance, and he did not know that he could have been a hero of amours. For all his stubbornness he was shy. He was not entirely ignorant of caresses but he did not make an occupation of them. He consorted with men whose virile pride it was to smoke filthy corncob pipes and to wear filthy sweaters.

The University had become his world. For him Elk Mills did not exist.