The outburst never came, for Mr Green suddenly seemed to remember the purpose of his talk. Quitting the description of his beloved equipment, he began to throw off his results, rather like a dog shaking itself after a bath. He had observed Jupiter and Saturn, measuring their positions with care, and he had found discrepancies from the Nautical Almanac. Running to the blackboard he wrote down the following figures, and then sat down:

Discrepancy in Longitude Discrepancy in Declination

Jupiter+1 minute 29 seconds–49 seconds Saturn+42 seconds–17 seconds

Kingsley never heard the loud applause offered to Mr Green as a reward for his address, for Kingsley was choking with rage. He had come up to the meeting expecting to be told of discrepancies amounting to no more than a few tenths of a second at most. These he could have attributed to inaccurate, incompetent measurement. Or there might have been a subtle mistake of a statistical nature. But the figures that Mr Green had written up on the board were preposterous, fantastic, so large that a blind man could have seen them, so large that Mr George Green must have made some quite outrageous blunder.

It must not be thought that Kingsley was an intellectual snob, that he objected to an amateur on principle. Less than two years previously he had listened in the very same room to a paper presented by an entirely unknown author. Kingsley had immediately perceived the quality and competence of the work and was the first person to give public praise to it. Incompetence was Kingsley’s béte noire, not incompetence performed in private but incompetence paraded in public. His irritation in this respect could be aroused in art and music as much as in science.

On this occasion he was a seething cauldron of wrath. So many ideas flashed through his head that he was unable to decide on any one particular comment, it seemed such a pity to waste the others. Before he could reach a decision, Dr Oldroyd sprang a surprise: