The professor was a young Dominican, who had filled several chairs in San Juan de Letran with zeal and good repute.

He had the reputation of being a great logician as well as a profound philosopher, and was one of the most promising in his clique.

His elders treated him with consideration, while the younger men envied him, for there were also cliques among them.

This was the third year of his professorship and, although the first in which he had taught physics and chemistry, he already passed for a sage, not only with the complaisant students but also among the other nomadic professors.

Padre Millon did not belong to the common crowd who each year change their subject in order to acquire scientific knowledge, students among other students, with the difference only that they follow a single course, that they quiz instead of being quizzed, that they have a better knowledge of Castilian, and that they are not examined at the completion of the course.