Page:Chesterton - The Wisdom of Father Brown.djvu/279

STRANGE CRIME OF JOHN BOULNOIS pragmatists alternated with pugilists in the long procession of its portraits.

Thus when a very unobtrusive Oxford man named John Boulnois wrote in a very unreadable review called The Natural Philosophy Quarterly a series of articles on alleged weak points in Darwinian evolution, it fluttered no corner of the English papers; though Boulnois's theory (which was that of a comparatively stationary universe visited occasionally by convulsions of change) had some rather faddy fashionableness at Oxford, and got so far as to be named "Catastrophism." But many American papers seized on the challenge as a great event; and the Sun threw the shadow of Mr. Boulnois quite gigantically across its pages. By the paradox already noted, articles of valuable intelligence and enthusiasm were presented with headlines apparently written by an illiterate maniac; headlines such as "Darwin Chews Dirt; Critic Boulnois says He Jumps the Shocks"—or "Keep Catastrophic, says Thinker Boulnois." And Mr. Calhoun Kidd, of The Western Sun, was bidden to take his butterfly tie and lugubrious visage down to the little house outside Oxford where Thinker Boulnois lived in happy ignorance of such a title.

That fated philosopher had consented, in a somewhat dazed manner, to receive the interviewer, and had named the hour of nine that evening. 265