At the age of six Randall Byrne could name and bound
every state in the Union and give the date of its
admission; at nine he was conversant with Homeric
Greek and Caesar; at twelve he read Aristophanes with
perfect understanding of the allusions of the day
and divided his leisure between Ovid and Horace; at
fifteen, wearied by the simplicity of Old English
and Thirteenth Century Italian, he dipped into the
history of Philosophy and passed from that, naturally,
into calculus and the higher mathematics; at eighteen
he took an A.B. from Harvard and while idling away
a pleasant summer with Hebrew and Sanscrit he delved
lightly into biology and its kindred sciences, having
reached the conclusion that Truth is greater than
Goodness or Beauty, because it comprises both, and
the whole is greater than any of its parts; at twenty-one
he pocketed his Ph.D. and was touched with the fever
of his first practical enthusiasm—surgery.
At twenty-four he was an M.D. and a distinguished
diagnostician, though he preferred work in his laboratory
in his endeavor to resolve the elements into simpler
forms; also he published at this time a work on anthropology
whose circulation was limited to two hundred copies,
and he received in return two hundred letters of congratulation
from great men who had tried to read his book; at
twenty-seven he collapsed one fine spring day on the
floor of his laboratory. That afternoon he was
carried into the presence of a great physician who
was also a very vulgar man. The great physician
felt his pulse and looked into his dim eyes.
“You have a hundred and twenty horsepower brain
and a runabout body,” said the great physician.
“I have come,” answered Randall Byrne
faintly, “for the solution of a problem, not
for the statement thereof.”
“I’m not through,” said the great
physician. “Among other things you are
a damned fool.”
Randall Byrne here rubbed his eyes.
“What steps do you suggest that I consider?”
he queried.
The great physician spat noisily.
“Marry a farmer’s daughter,” he
said brutally.
“But,” said Randall Byrne vaguely.
“I am a busy man and you’ve wasted ten
minutes of my time,” said the great physician,
turning back to his plate glass window. “My
secretary will send you a bill for one thousand dollars.
Good-day.”
And therefore, ten days later, Randall Byrne sat in
his room in the hotel at Elkhead.
He had just written (to his friend Swinnerton Loughburne,
M.A., Ph.D., L.L.D.): “Incontrovertibly
the introduction of the personal equation leads to
lamentable inversions, and the perceptive faculties
when contemplating phenomena through the lens of ego
too often conceive an accidental connotation or manifest
distortion to be actuality, for the physical (or personal)
too often beclouds that power of inner vision which
so unerringly penetrates to the inherent truths of
