Beelzebubs-Tales-to-His-Grandson-by-G-I-Gurdjieff

and he applied himself particularly to finding out why it was that, during thetreatment of the "cancer" by X-rays there had arisen in his wife's body thoseindependent "concentrations" which usually do not develop in this diseaseand which in his long years of previous study he had never come acrossbefore." 'Since it turned out to be very complicated to investigate this problem,and moreover impracticable in the surrounding conditions in which he wasliving, he decided to come to me and with my help solve it by experiment." 'And that was why he had brought all the necessary materials with himfor these experiments." 'The next day I put at his disposal one of the sections of our undergrounddomain as well as several what are called "Salmamoorsian goats" andeverything else he might need for his research." 'Among other preparations, he first put the Roentgen apparatus intooperation by means of the Bunsen elements.'And three days after his arrival, he made a discovery which led to theorigin of the permanent electric lighting in our caves." 'And it began in the following way:" 'While we were making certain experiments, using my vibrometers, andwere calculating the vibrations of the electric current that produced X-rays inthe Roentgen apparatus, we noticed that the number of vibrations of thecurrent obtained by means of these Bunsen elements sometimes increasedand sometimes diminished, and since it was of the greatest importance for ourinvestigations to have a flow of current with a uniform number of vibrationsin a given time interval, it was soon obvious to us that this sort of electriccurrent was absolutely useless for our purposes.'This realization very much discouraged and depressed my young friend.