Page:Gaston Leroux--The man with the black feather.djvu/77

Rh water-finder to the spot where one suspects the presence of water. I shall bring you there when you have your Black Feather."

He paused, and then went on in his professorial tone:

"I shall have to talk to you about Darwin; but you need n't be uneasy: I shan't have to talk about him for long. You 'll understand at once. You know that Darwin devoted a great part of his life to some famous experiments of which the most famous were his experiments with pigeons. Desirous of accounting for the phenomena of heredity, he studied closely the breeding of pigeons. He chose pigeons because the generations of pigeons follow one another so closely that one can draw conclusions from them in a comparatively short space of time. At the end of a certain number, call it X, of generations he found once more the same pigeon. You understand, the same pigeon, with the same defects and the same qualities, the same shape, the same structure, and the same black feather in the very place where the first pigeon had a black feather. Well, I, Adolphe Lecamus, maintain, and I will prove it to you, that to eyes opened by Darwin it is the same with souls as with bodies. At the end of a number X of generations, one finds the