Page:The Poison Belt - Conan Doyle, 1913.djvu/86

 Rh  we named our toxic agent. Let it be daturon. To you, my dear Summerlee, belongs the honour—posthumous, alas! but none the less unique—of having given a name to the universal destroyer, the great Gardener's disinfectant. The symptoms of daturon, then, may be taken, to be such as I indicate. That it will involve the whole world and that no life can possibly remain behind seems to me to be certain, since ether is a universal medium. Up to now it has been capricious in the places which it has attacked, but the difference is only a matter of a few hours, and it is like an advancing tide which covers one strip of sand and then another, running hither and thither in irregular streams, until at last it has submerged it all. There are laws at work in connection with the action and distribution of daturon which would have been of deep interest had the time at our disposal permitted us to study them. So far as I can trace them"—here he