He should, as
soon as ever the breath is out of his body, be dissected, and though
they would, of course, destroy his lungs, as they will be full of
pneumococci, his liver and digestive organs are probably healthy. Take
them out, keep them in a sterilised atmosphere with the temperature
at 98·4, and sell the liver, let us say, to another poor devil who has
cancer there. Fit him with a new healthy liver, eh?”

“And insert the brain of someone who has died of heart disease into the
skull of a congenital idiot?” I asked. “Yes, perhaps; but the brain’s tiresomely complicated in its
connections and the joining up of the nerves, you know. Surgery will
have to learn a lot before it fits new brains in. And the brain has got
such a lot of functions. All thinking, all inventing seem to belong to
it, though, as you have seen, the heart can get on quite well without
it. But there are other functions of the brain I want to study first. I’ve been trying some experiments already.”

He made some little readjustment to the flame of the spirit lamp which
kept at the right temperature the water that surrounded the sterilised
receptacle in which the frog’s heart was beating. “Start with the more simple and mechanical uses of the brain,” he said. “Primarily it is a sort of record office, a diary. Say that I rap your
knuckles with that ruler. What happens? The nerves there send a message
to the brain, of course, saying--how can I put it most simply--saying,
‘Somebody is hurting me.’ And the eye sends another, saying ‘I perceive
a ruler hitting my knuckles,’ and the ear sends another, saying ‘I hear
the rap of it.’ But leaving all that alone, what else happens? Why, the
brain records it. It makes a note of your knuckles having been hit.”

He had been moving about the room as he spoke, taking off his coat and
waistcoat and putting on in their place a thin black dressing-gown,
and by now he was seated in his favourite attitude cross-legged on the
hearthrug, looking like some magician or perhaps the afrit which a
magician of black arts had caused to appear. He was thinking intently
now, passing through his fingers his string of amber beads, and talking
more to himself than to me. “And how does it make that note?” he went on. “Why, in the manner in
which phonograph records are made. There are millions of minute dots,
depressions, pockmarks on your brain which certainly record what you
remember, what you have enjoyed or disliked, or done or said. The
surface of the brain anyhow is large enough to furnish writing-paper
for the record of all these things, of all your memories. If the
impression of an experience has not been acute, the dot is not sharply
impressed, and the record fades: in other words, you come to forget it. But if it has been vividly impressed, the record is never obliterated. Mrs. Gabriel, for instance, won’t lose the impression of how she
lathered her husband’s face after she had cut his throat. That’s to
say, if she did it.”

“Now do you see what I’m driving at? Of course you do. There is stored
within a man’s head the complete record of all the memorable things
he has done and said: there are all his thoughts there, and all his
speeches, and, most well-marked of all, his habitual thoughts and the
things he has often said; for habit, there is reason to believe, wears
a sort of rut in the brain, so that the life-principle, whatever it is,
as it gropes and steals about the brain, is continually stumbling into
it. There’s your record, your gramophone plate all ready. What we want,
and what I’m trying to arrive at, is a needle which, as it traces its
minute way over these dots, will come across words or sentences which
the dead have uttered, and will reproduce them. My word, what Judgment
Books! What a resurrection!”

Here in this withdrawn situation no remotest echo of the excitement
which was seething through the streets penetrated; through the open
window there came in only the tide of the midnight silence. But from
somewhere closer at hand, through the wall surely of the laboratory,
there came a low, somewhat persistent murmur. “Perhaps our needle--unhappily not yet invented--as it passed over the
record of speech in the brain, might induce even facial expression,” he
said. “Enjoyment or horror might even pass over dead features. There
might be gestures and movements even, as the words were reproduced
in our gramophone of the dead. Some people when they want to think
intensely walk about: some, there’s an instance of it audible now, talk
to themselves aloud.”

He held up his finger for silence. “Yes, that’s Mrs. Gabriel,” he said. “She talks to herself by the hour
together. She’s always done that, she tells me. I shouldn’t wonder if
she has plenty to talk about.”

It was that night when, first of all, the notion of intense activity
going on below the placid house-fronts of the Terrace occurred to me. None looked more quiet than this, and yet there was seething here
a volcanic activity and intensity of living, both in the man who
sat cross-legged on the floor and behind that voice just audible
through the partition wall. But I thought of that no more, for Horton
began speaking of the brain-gramophone again.... Were it possible to
trace those infinitesimal dots and pockmarks in the brain by some
needle exquisitely fine, it might follow that by the aid of some such
contrivance as translated the pockmarks on a gramophone record into
sound, some audible rendering of speech might be recovered from the
brain of a dead man. It was necessary, so he pointed out to me, that
this strange gramophone record should be new; it must be that of one
lately dead, for corruption and decay would soon obliterate these
infinitesimal markings. He was not of opinion that unspoken thought
could be thus recovered: the utmost he hoped for from his pioneering
work was to be able to recapture actual speech, especially when such
speech had habitually dwelt on one subject, and thus had worn a rut on
that part of the brain known as the speech-centre. “Let me get, for instance,” he said, “the brain of a railway porter,
newly dead, who has been accustomed for years to call out the name
of a station, and I do not despair of hearing his voice through my
gramophone trumpet. Or again, given that Mrs. Gabriel, in all her
interminable conversations with herself, talks about one subject, I
might, in similar circumstances, recapture what she had been constantly
saying. Of course my instrument must be of a power and delicacy still
unknown, one of which the needle can trace the minutest irregularities
of surface, and of which the trumpet must be of immense magnifying
power, able to translate the smallest whisper into a shout. But just as
a microscope will show you the details of an object invisible to the
eye, so there are instruments which act in the same way on sound. Here,
for instance, is one of remarkable magnifying power.