Something about the rounded shoulders and narrow chest bespoke the bookish man, the "scholar's slope," they used to call it. His hands were large and broad at the finger-tips, such must have done manual labour in their time, pick-and-shovel work, possibly. At the moment of his walking into this story they were--I will not say dirty, but redolent of the soil, for as he went he would still be fumbling in a roomy wallet which pulled down his shoulder, and be taking therefrom for close and loving inspection this or that shapeless fragment of stone which he would presently return to the society of its fellows.
"It never came here by accident--there is no such thing," he murmured, conversing with himself, thought discussing matters with thought, as do the thoughts of those of us who live the single life, or cherish interests which are unshared by those with whom we cohabit. "We have no example from this level," he went on, turning in hand a something small and angular which he had picked up a few yards down the slope, a fragment of grey chert it was. "Three conchoidal fractures are sufficient, when associated with such patination. Here are--six--eight minor flaws in these cutting edges, apart from the cross-fracture--(patinated too). Yes, undoubtedly a used-up flake. And the thing hasn't travelled half-a-mile from home.... Where's the floor?"
"And, to think," he went on, "that such evidence would be lost--wasted upon that young doctor-fellow. It is almost incredible, the crass ignorance of our so-called scientific men.... Tried to interest him ... no use.... 'Out here to climb,' he says!... And with lovely things like these under his feet.... Amazing!"
In fact, the professor exhibited the impatience which the man of one idea feels for the man of another, and had even the personal repulsion which a man with the Oxford manner experiences for one who begins all his sentences with "_M'yess!_"
From which disjointed self-communings the reader will have already deduced that the professor was an ethnologist, one of that small band of heroes who during the past hundred years have quietly dug out and fitted together the buried past of the human race, pelted all the while by Ignorance and Bigotry as they delved.