The Cautious Traveller's Guide to the Wastelands

by Sarah Brooks

“Ah, that is the infamous Dr. Henry Grey,” says the Countess, dropping her voice further but speaking with a certain amount of relish. “Poor man, one cannot help but feel rather sorry for him. These scientific gentlemen do take embarrassment to their reputation terribly hard.” The story had been reported with some glee in the press, the Countess explains—Dr. Grey’s famous discovery of a fossil inside the corpse of a seal on a beach in England, a fossil that showed a perfect representation of a child curled up as if in the womb and that proved, he had claimed, that animals contain within them the blueprints for their eventual evolution into the most perfect of forms, the human—it had all been shown to be wrong. What he claimed showed a human child was actually the curled form of an ancient sea creature, trapped in the limestone of the cliffs and then swallowed by mistake by the innocent seal. All Dr. Grey’s claims came tumbling down, loudly and publicly. The Frenchman Girard, so proud of his theory of the evolution of forms, had mocked him on the stage of the Paris Institute. “Who could mistake a crab for a child? Only an Englishman!”